Bare Marriage
Bare Marriage
Episode 246: How Toxic Marriage Advice Mirrors Coercive Control
What if you discovered that marriage books like The Excellent Wife actually follows Steve Hassan's BITE model of cult indoctrination? And what if these marriage books were giving advice that mirrored coercive control?
Bare Marriage podcast, episode 246, featuring Bethany Jantzi. Bethany did her thesis on coercive control, and today she shows us how these books use methods like: diminishing/devaluing personhood; undermining autonomy; creating psychological dependency; using a fear-based system of control; suppressing critical thinking; and conditioning compliance. And all of those things factor into abuse rates and coercive control. And we can do better than this!
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THINGS MENTIONED:
How God Sees Women by Terran Williams
Marg Mowczko on Bible Interpretations
Our Series on the Danvers Statement
Timestamps
0.11 Intro
11.30 Complimentarianism
18.24 God Knows Best
31.50 Control and Domination
40.10 Wife as a Training Ground
59.30 Are We Under Undue Influence
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Sheila: Welcome to the Bare Marriage podcast. I’m Sheila Wray Gregoire from baremarriage.com where we like to talk about healthy, evidence-based, biblical advice for your sex life and your marriage. And this is the second episode in a row about the book, The Excellent Wife. Last week Tia Levings and Marissa Burt joined me to look at Martha Peace’s book, which is one of the worst, I can say, books I’ve ever read and is just so heavily into male hierarchy and complementarianism and, honestly, does much harm. So if you didn’t listen to that episode, please do so that you can get a background of what we’re talking about today because I am going to bring on someone who is an expert in coercive control to take another look at some of the elements in Martha’s book but also some of the bigger elements in our church circles. Before I do that though, I want to say thank you to some important people. First of all, I want to thank our sponsor, which is the Kingdom Girls Bible. Such an amazing Bible, which highlights all the stories of the amazing women in Scripture including some you probably haven’t heard of. So if you want to get away from a male hierarchy faith and you want your daughters to feel really empowered and included in Christianity, please take a look at the Kingdom Girls Bible. It’s just incredible. And I want to say thank you to our patrons, who help us do what we do by giving us money every month. And that money helps us pay the bills, keep everything open so that we can do this and make more of an impact. You can join our patron for as little as $5 a month and that gets you into our amazing Facebook group. And even for a little more you’ll even get unfiltered podcasts. Becca and Joanna have done so many of those for the next year, and they’re super fun too. You can also give tax deductible receipts for the work that we do getting our research out there and disseminating our information through the Good Fruit Faith Initiative of the Bosco Foundation. And you can get those tax receipts within the United States, and the link to that is in the podcast notes. So thank you, again, for your support. Thank you for joining us. And now I am so excited to bring on someone, who has done a lot of work in coercive control and in cults and in mind control or undue influence. And she’s been a listener of the Bare Marriage podcast and a fan of our podcast. And she reached out to me, and I so appreciate her work. So without further ado, here is Bethany. Well, this is a fun one. I have on Bethany Jantzi. Hi, Bethany.
Bethany: Hi, Sheila.
Sheila: And I was thinking you’re probably one of the people that I am about to interview who lives the closest to me. I once had someone from my own hometown. But you’re from Barrie, Ontario, which is not that far from Belleville, Ontario.
Bethany: Yeah. I think it’s maybe only three to four hours. So not too bad.
Sheila: Yeah. About three hours. Yeah. And you reached out. You’ve been a long time listener, and you reached out because you had just done a thesis—your Masters of psychology in coercive control at the University of Salford, which is in the UK. And you had just done this thesis looking at The Excellent Wife among other things and how that actually could be seen as a form of coercive control and how this really ties in. I thought your thesis was fascinating, and I thought, “Wow. After we have this conversation about The Excellent Wife, I need to bring Bethany on, and you can talk about this.” So thank you for reaching out.
Bethany: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah. I had to do my own research for my dissertation. And I decided to evaluate whether complementarian headship theology was a risk factor or a protective factor for women. And so I looked at theology as an extension of coercive control against women. So yeah. It’s definitely right on target with what you guys have been exploring.
Sheila: Yeah. And I just want to point out that we are told over and over again that complementarianism protects women because it—men are told they need to be leaders, and they need to be protectors. And so because of complementarianism, women are protected, but that’s actually not the case.
Bethany: Yeah. That’s exactly what I found is that—and I’m sure we’ll get into this. But the very psychological processes that happen under coercive control really disengage a person’s ability to protect themselves from controlling systems and from abuse. So by its very definition as a system and as an ideology, it is not protective, but it is a risk factor.
Sheila: Yeah. Exactly. Okay. So I want to talk about coercive control, and I want to talk about The Excellent Wife. I want to talk about all this fun stuff. But one thing that is interesting about coercive control is that the UK, I think, is ahead of Canada on this because the UK has actually criminalized coercive control because they understand it’s not just what we think of commonly as abuse. But it’s this whole system of control, and that system can be abusive. So tell us what coercive control is.
Bethany: Yeah. So there’s a lot of different conceptualizations, but the main one that I operate off of is basically a pattern of behavior that has, at its core, an intention of dominating and controlling another person. And the main tactics that that person will deploy are things like isolation, intimidation, humiliation. Threats and fear form a really big piece of this. And then, of course, violence is often a part of it, but the way it works with abuse is that often threats can be just as effective. So a person deploys violence once. After that point, they can just use the threat of violence, and that will be just as effective. So coercive control, as a tool, really helps us look more at a micro level at what happens when we look at things like psychological abuse, emotional abuse. So these really very covert forms of abuse that often people have a really hard time pinpointing, and that’s what coercive control, as a framework, really gives us as a tool to understand how this works.
Sheila: Right. And as we’ve been doing our research, it is really hard to find studies on do complementarian marriages lead to more abuse. It certainly is suggested, and we have found some studies that show that it does. But it’s difficult because—and one of the big problems, of course, is that not everyone who says they’re complementarian actually acts it out. And so we’ve gone back and forth on this on trying to find this. But I really like the way that you took it which is—okay. Let’s just see what the elements of coercive control are, and now let’s see if those elements are actually part of the complementarian theological system. Yeah.
Bethany: Yeah. And I think, too, the core problem that I kept kind of coming up against when I was doing this research is that people who don’t have a conceptualization of abuse or a language for what they’re experiencing they will report it very differently than people who will say this is abuse. This is emotional abuse. This is psychological manipulation. And so that’s one of the challenges, and one of the things that kept coming up for me as an additional risk factor in these environments was that they don’t equip people to be able to recognize and point out abuse. And, therefore, they tend to respond very poorly to it. And the women in it—who are in faith environments tend to stay longer because of that as one of the factors.
Sheila: Yeah. Yeah. Which is really sad. And I’ve seen a lot of studies about that. It’s not necessarily that abuse is higher in faith communities. It’s just that women in faith communities don’t leave nearly as quickly. And they’re stuck in it.
Bethany: Yeah. And I think, too—this is why I feel like complementarian theology as an ideology is particularly harmful, destructive, and really traps people is because, if you think about a lot of cults and high control groups, the ones that are kind of very alluring and draw in a lot of people, they leverage off of already existing religious systems. So when you use the Scripture and you talk about Christianity, people recognize that. So you don’t have to work hard to get people to buy into your theology. So they come in, but then there’s all these distortions. And so you have multiple layers of women being trapped who are in an abusive relationship within their faith community. So if that woman was in an abusive relationship but not part of the faith community, she would only be trapped under one layer. But because it’s as part of her spiritual practice and faith, she’s trapped under multiple layers. So yeah. It is very tragic. Yeah. And striking how much longer women will stay.
Sheila: I have a quote from your thesis about what you just said, and I just want to read it because it was so good. You said, “Complementarian theology maybe a risk factor for coercive control because women within these systems are uniquely vulnerable to abuse and control with the justification that the mandate of headship and submission is God ordained. It is not just their abuser they must extricate themselves from but this God and their broader faith community.” That’s so sad.
Bethany: Yeah. And the thing is that faith and church attendance is usually a protective factor in terms of our mental health. But if there’s abuse, we just see it go sideways so frequently, and that makes me really sad that, in the name of God, that these things are being perpetrated and covered up and that women are being sent back to their abusers all in the name of God. That is just egregious to me.
Sheila: Right. Exactly. Okay. So let’s get back. For everyone who is listening, most of us have heard the words abuse. And 10 years ago, 15 years ago, when we heard abuse, we pictured something physical, maybe sexual. And now I think people are starting to realize, no, wait. Emotional abuse is just as bad. Psychological abuse is just as bad. And we know that when someone is the victim of emotional abuse it actually is physical because, in the long term, that has repercussions on her body. What we’re now—but a lot of people—so we may have come that far. But I don’t think a lot of people have the language for coercive control and what that means. So can you define it for me?
Bethany: Yeah. Yeah. So coercive control is a pattern of behavior where one person seeks to control another person using tactics like isolation, intimidation, threats, fear, manipulation, and sometimes, but not always, violence. So coercive control is really any kind of pattern of repetitive behavior that is aimed at dominating another person.
Sheila: Mm-hmm. Exactly. Okay. So keep that in mind. Remember those words. Okay. So coercive control is a pattern of behavior aimed at dominating someone. Now what does that have to do with complementarianism? And we should actually—we should likely define complementarianism first too. I mean anyone who has been listening to the Bare Marriage podcast knows this but in case this is the first one you have listened to. So there’s kind of two different belief systems about how we’re supposed to live in marriage. The more mutual belief system says that both husband and wife submit to one another while they follow after God together. And nobody has authority over the other. We submit ourselves to God. He is our ultimate authority. And in order to make decisions, we pray together. We submit to one another. We love each other, et cetera. The other side is the complementarian theology, which says that the husband follows God. In fact, Martha Peace says this in The Excellent Wife as we talked about last week on the podcast. So the husband follows God, and the wife follows the husband. So the husband is the one who obeys God. The wife is the one who obeys the husband, and she actually does use the word obey. Some complementarians do not, but the idea is that the husband is in authority over the wife. And they call this the doctrine of headship. That he is an authority and so he—because he is responsible—God has made him responsible for the family and for the wife, he gets to make the final decisions and the final call. And she must follow him. Yeah.
Bethany: Yeah. So I think just right off the bat anything that sets up a power imbalance and entrenches that as being a central feature of the relationship is going to be a risk factor for coercive control. But what we see with complementarianism and Martha Peace is that they use a lot of spiritual language to cover that and to dress that up, and so it makes it a bit harder to detect. And this is where we see, I would say, a lot of kind of manipulative, rhetorical strategies that Martha Peace uses in her book and even complementarians—the way that they frame themselves use. So when we look at this, when we see that we separate the roles based out on gender, when we live in a world where men tend to have more power but we baptize it in spiritual language, there’s going to be very real social implications, particularly within marriage. And one of the ways that we see this play out is that it normalizes male control over females. And when we normalize it, it’s much harder to see, and it becomes just part and parcel of people’s experiences under this ideology.
Sheila: Yeah. So you’ll be at a women’s Bible study. And some women will be talking about how wonderful it is that the submission to your husband and how she submits and she really embraces her role and it’s great. But she’s married to a guy, who is amazing, and he never actually makes the final decisions. They actually function as equals, but they use this language. And then someone else in that same Bible study is in a relationship where the husband is domineering and very controlling and where she can’t do anything. But because other people are mirroring this language, she figures, well, this is just normal what I’m going through. Yeah.
Bethany: Yeah. Exactly. And I think the other implication with men being uniquely gifted for leadership and women—wives being gifted to follow and to be that partner is that it implies that there is some kind of inherent weakness in women. And so when you have this inequality—and I think, too—so we often compare it to Jesus and God and their relationship. But as you know, our husbands are very fallible human beings, and Jesus is perfect. So the analogy really breaks down. So an implication of this ideology is that it devalues women, and it provides a rationalization and a justification for husbands to control their wives. And then because of that, it sets up this dynamic that when a woman does assert her personhood or her independence the husband is criticized if he doesn’t clamp down on that. One of the alarming pieces of data that I worked with was a podcast interview where they talked about how—when this couple first got married the wife was just really outgoing. And she initiated friendships and loved to build community. And the husband framed that as something that needed to work on and that that was something that needed to be reined in because, for some reason, that was an unhealthy trait because it was the wife that was displaying it. So it wasn’t the husband leading. So yeah.
Sheila: That’s funny you mention that because that was one of the quotes that I pulled from your thesis. I thought it was so interesting. Yeah.
Bethany: Yeah. So yeah. So it sets up a justification and a rationality for men to control their wives. And then they are in a place where they need to respond if they perceive that their wife is stepping out of that role. And so you can see how the husband’s control over his wife could just get tighter and tighter and tighter. And that’s where we see the use of fear and threats being brought in as a really effective tool to control someone. And we know that Martha uses a lot of fear and a lot of threats throughout her book.
Sheila: Yeah. Her book actually is coercive control. It’s quite phenomenal. Yeah. I want to say this really clearly. So the argument that we’re essentially making is if we know that this is what coercive control looks like and that these are the elements of coercive control and then we look at the complementarian system and the complementarian system has a lot of those elements then we should not be surprised if abuse rates are higher and if women are suffering more in that. So we’re not trying to claim that everyone who is complementarian is pro abuse. That’s not what we’re saying. Or that everyone who is complementarian is abusive. But they need to recognize that the theology that they are preaching and the way they are preaching that theology does enable coercive control because they actually are in many cases one and the same. And so—yeah. Let’s just talk about this. So in your thesis, you broke down four different teachings or ways that people teach that really related to coercive control and really play into these dynamics. And the first one is God knows best. So explain to me what you mean by that.
Bethany: Yeah. So God knows best is kind of a thought stopping phrase that, in high control groups, is a really effective tool to rely on. So it’s a way to get that person who might be expressing that there’s trouble, there are distressing situations, they’re suffering, they feel like they’re being harmed, God knows best. God’s way is best. God’s plan is best. Therefore, this relationship, these dynamics, even if it seems to be causing harm or there’s abuse, God knows best. So just full stop. You don’t really need to ask any more questions or explore beyond that.
Sheila: Right. We see this even before there’s abuse. When people are explaining the idea of gender roles and how God created men and women with different roles—and I just want to point out—this is something that really bugs me. Even that whole argument doesn’t hold water because if you’re saying that men and women have different roles, then what you’re saying is that there are some things that men can do that women can’t. And some things that women can do that men can’t. But in this idea of different roles, there is absolutely nothing that women can do that men can’t. Other than biological, which isn’t a role. It’s biology. So yes. Women can have a baby, and women can nurse. And men can’t. But that’s biological. That’s not about a role. So it isn’t about different roles for men and women. It’s simply about restricting women. They use this nice language of how it’s about different roles, but it isn’t because everything that women can do men can also do. It’s just that there’s some things men get to do that women can’t. So it’s about restricting women. Anyway, that’s just my little thing. But often when they’re explaining the complementarian way, they actually start with this God knows best. I know this sounds strange to our modern ears, but God knows best. This is the way. From the very beginning, you’re told you’re not allowed to have critical thinking about this.
Bethany: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And I found that for a woman that went ever further and that Martha Peace really saw women thinking and asking questions and having doubts as something that was a threat to her ability to submit to her husband which was really the crux of the marriage and what it means to be a biblical wife. And so not questioning God and this just cutting things off with saying God knows best was even more strongly applied to women in a way that really devalued their intellect and their decision making ability, their ideas that they might have. So yeah. So God knows best, but man is made in the image of God. And God has power. And that power trickles down to the husband. So the husband stands in God’s power. And so we often see that, in this book, Martha attributes the husband’s decisions and the choices that he makes as, in a lot of ways, carrying the weight of God. And so you really see that throughout this woman just really—their world becomes smaller and smaller and smaller in a way that really devalues them and doesn’t give them many options.
Sheila: Right. Exactly. One of the things we were talking about last week with Marissa and Tia when we looked at The Excellent Wife was how many Bible verses there are. Seriously, I swear the book is at least a third Bible verses, which makes it sound like, oh, well, then this book must be really quote unquote biblical. But it’s actually a rhetorical tool that she’s using.
Bethany: Absolutely.
Sheila: Because she’s taking these out of context. And all she does is print the verses about how we are supposed to give up our rights. We’re supposed to submit. We’re supposed to obey authority, et cetera. But she never shares any of the verses about justice and about how God cares for the oppressed and about how we are to obey God, not man. She never shares those ones.
Bethany: Yeah. Yeah. And the ones that she does share have a very coercive and kind of threatening underpinning to them towards women, what they should be doing. And the thing with the whole God knows best and God’s thoughts are so much higher than our thoughts is that this type of reliance on thought stopping and undercutting your critical thinking, it really leads to a level of psychological control that makes up the core of coercive control. So you even just see that the way that they use Scripture fosters and supports psychological control. And it fosters further dependence on the person with the most power, the husband. So it’s a very dangerous dynamic to establish.
Sheila: Yeah. And remember that the thing—when they say God knows best and I know what God says because here’s what Scripture says and you can’t argue with Scripture, the Bible says it, I believe is, so I’ll do it kind of thing is that they are equating their interpretation of Scripture with Scripture itself.
Bethany: Yes. Yes. And that was one of my criticisms in the way that Martha uses Scriptures is that she often speaks as if she is God in a way but really it’s like there’s so many levels of interpretation and bias and cultural frameworks that are being applied before we get to those words coming out of her mouth. So it’s really not that simple. Yeah. It’s very striking when I was reading through that. How much fear and control are a core part of the way that she uses Scripture when it comes to women.
Sheila: Yeah. We talked about this a couple weeks ago on the podcast. We had Scott Coley on with his book, Ministers of Propaganda, about how people misuse the Bible. So if you’re interested in this conversation, please go back and listen to that one too. I’ll put the link in the podcast notes. But, Bethany, when you wrote to me, you actually said that in a lot of ways what Martha is doing with this conforms to the BITE Model that Steven Hassan—is that—
Bethany: Yes. Hassan. Yeah.
Sheila: Hassan. Developed about cults. Last week when we were talking about The Excellent Wife Tia kept referring to this as a cult and said that she got of our cult, which was the Gothard movement, which I definitely believe is a cult. But Hassan has four—the BITE Model has four elements that—isn’t that cute? B I T E. Let me see if I can get this right because I had researched this before getting on here with you, so you can test me, okay? So behavior control, information control. So what you’re allowed to read, what you’re allowed to see, et cetera. Oh gosh. What’s the T? Don’t tell me. Is it just—no. I’ve lost it. What’s the T?
Bethany: Thought control.
Sheila: Thought control. Of course.
Bethany: So like God knows best. That is a thought stopping tool. Yeah. Stops your thinking. Controls your thinking. And then do you remember what the E stands for?
Sheila: Emotions, right?
Bethany: Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So a big part of my program was studying cults and also things like brain washing and social conditioning. And often I don’t like to use the word cult because I feel like people have a knee-jerk reaction to it, but I agree with Tia. So lots of time I’ll talk about things being a high control group. And yeah. So when we look at Steve Hassan’s criteria for high control groups and for cults and I think about the thought control that is encouraged and fostered in this book, it really is on a masterful level. I said this book is basically a playbook for how to enact coercive control using Scripture. And so the thing about thought control and thought stopping and using fear and threats is that what that does is that it creates a very destabilizing psychological environment. And human beings, we want psychological safety. And so how we get that is through a lot of different ways, but conformity is a part of that. So think of how vulnerable people will be to Martha’s book and to this teaching if you throw at them all these threats and use fear and talk about what God will do to you should you know submit to your husband and how God will punish you and how brutal it can be. It destabilizes you, so you’re so much more receptive to someone telling you what the answer is. How you can alleviate that fear and that discomfort. So then Martha just hands you this whole system and says if you follow this and strive so hard, never stop striving, it will keep you safe. And she actually uses—this is what she does masterfully actually is that she talks about control, but she frames it as protection for women. And one of the chapters—I think it’s The Basis for Biblical Submission, and then the subheading is The Basis of the Wife’s Protection. So she codes control as protection, which is such a masterful reframing of that concept to get women to accept this level of control over their life.
Sheila: Yeah. I pulled this quote from your thesis about how Peace does that. I want to read this. So this is—I’m going to start the quote by something that Peace. So this is what Martha Peace says in The Excellent Wife. “It is evil when a wife rebels against God’s word and her husband. An appropriate fear of the Lord puts all things into proper perspective. ‘And do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul. But rather fear him who is able to destroy both body and soul in hell.’” And then you summarize this, and you say, “This paints an overtly threatening picture that implies a wife should fear spiritual death and separation from God over physical harm or death using spiritual language that minimizes the importance of one’s current well being by utilizing phrase that imply we only need to trust God, who is control, can be a form of thought terminating clichés that invalidate and trivialize real suffering for promised eternal good or spiritual growth.” Yeah.
Bethany: Yeah. Yeah. And that is what I was talking about how it fosters and enables this psychological state that makes you very compliant and very suggestible to your group’s widely held beliefs because, outside of that, everything is a threat. And it gets to the point—this thought control becomes so imbedded that women get very good at self policing. So we’re monitoring our own thoughts, and we’re saying, “Nope. Don’t have that doubt. Don’t ask that question.” That you can even remove that person from that environment and the engine of control is so effective and perpetuated by this thought control that that woman will still be policing her own thoughts and reinforcing that level of control. So that’s the power of weaponizing fear and threats and then providing an answer to alleviate that.
Sheila: Yeah. Which is what she does. So that’s number one. God knows best. Then we have male headship, which is that men are put in authority over women. And that this is a protection. This is benevolent. And I had someone on my Facebook page talking about this yesterday. What is wrong with wanting a benevolent leader? And it’s like yeah. How many times has that happened in history? How many times have we had benevolent dictators? It doesn’t happen. And if you are putting your husband in the role of dictator of your life, which is what Martha Peace is saying when you have to obey your husband in everything even the length of your hair, what you make for dinner, how you discipline the kids, even if he is hitting you, you have to obey him in how to discipline the kids, that’s a dictator.
Bethany: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s someone who is dominating another person and who is relegating their partner to a subordinate position of just always supporting that husband. And I think even a kind, gentle-hearted man, who is enmeshed with this ideology, with this theology, I feel like even he is going to struggle with how this might start slowly changing the way that he views his wife and how he views her independence and her individuality as a threat to the perception of his control and headship over her. And that rolls downhill into coercion very quickly.
Sheila: Yeah. I have a quote. One of our patrons actually—we were having this conversation in the patron page, and he said something really insightful which I asked if I could write a post about which is basically that not all abusers started out as wanting to dominate. And so this is what he said. “In my case, my narcissistic behavior was due to, one, emotional regulation issues from childhood trauma, and, two, OCD. I had no idea how much my desire to control my wife and children came from my brain’s desire to stay safe when my amygdala was firing. Neither of those excuses the trauma that they caused, and we’ve been working through that. And it’s required my complete ownership with no excuses to my family and a lot of work to turn that around. I’m still in the process. But my case was one example where it wasn’t really about a desire for power at all. It was a desire to control those around me because of my inability to process my fear and trauma.” So that was his story. He was controlling, but it wasn’t because he wanted to dominate. It was because of all these other reasons. But he goes on to say the problem was that the theology put him in a place where he could justify this. And I concluded this. “The problem is that the church takes men like this one, who have unprocessed childhood wounds, and so who naturally clamor for control in relationships and tells them that this is spiritually good. And so instead of helping these men grow emotionally, they actually put up stumbling blocks to emotional growth by saying your maladaptive coping strategies are actually of God.”
Bethany: Mm-hmm. Yeah. That is so well said. Yeah. No matter what struggles that man has—maybe he doesn’t have a tendency towards cruelty, but I’m sure that he still has some areas of his life where he feels insecure or where he’s dealing with trauma or struggles with reactivity. And then you just give men this ideology, and you tell them that the level to which they perform these roles is a reflection of their obedience to God and that this is a spiritual practice. You are just putting so much pressure on them. Yeah. Like you said, it doesn’t even need to be someone who is prone to cruelty. It just needs to be a very human man, who has gone through things, who might suffer or have insecurity, or be selfish sometimes, and you give them so much control. And the scary thing is that the scope of submission that Martha lays out in the book is utterly terrifying. She takes away very little things that women use to signify their independence and their autonomy and their control over their body. So even the clothes they wear, their hairstyles, control over the space that they live in, but she includes all of that in the scope of which men can have control over, which is terrifying to me.
Sheila: Yeah. And she’s told that resting is self indulgent, that napping is self indulgent. So if you’ve got a toddler and a baby and you’re exhausted and you’re trying to manage the whole house by yourself because you’re told that’s your role and that your role is to look after the children, it’s not your husband’s role. But resting is self indulgent. Yeah.
Bethany: Yeah. Yeah. And I think too the other thing that just very clearly makes this coercive and coercive control is the level of sacrifice that she requires of women, the way that she expects them to disconnect from their own needs, their own desires, their own opinions and ideas in a way that they are not their own separate entity. They exist and all their resources exist to support their husband in his role. So then the wife isn’t really a full human being. She is basically a training ground for her husband to work out and try and strengthen his leadership capabilities, which is a terrifying thing.
Sheila: My copy of The Excellent Wife that I have—I don’t like to buy these things. But people give me boatloads and huge boxes of terrible books so that I have them for research purposes. And this is one. So I got a used copy of it. And there’s a lot of notes in it. And the notes are so sad. But there’s one page where the woman, who had it, writes, “I was created as Andrew’s helpful. He was not created as mine. And I need to stop resenting Andrew if he doesn’t help me.” And there’s just stuff like—and she’s underlined all the stuff about abuse. How you have to endure abuse and how you need to wait as long as it takes, and it’s really, really sad.
Bethany: Yeah. I actually read some of the reviews of this book on Amazon or Goodreads, and I was like whoa. Someone could take these as data points to measure the impact of this book. I actually spent some time reading some of the reviews for this book. I think it was on Amazon or Goodreads. And it was very disheartening. And what struck me so much was how we saw that these women ended up arriving at a place psychologically which we have determined to be the experience of someone who is a victim of coercive control. So they described feeling worthless, feeling hopeless, and feeling a sense of despair. And that just broke my heart. I felt like it was such strong evidence for how damaging this is and that this is actually a form of coercive control that has been spiritualized and rationalized using distortions of Scripture but weaponized against women, normalizing men’s control over them. Yeah. There’s really no way of getting around the damage that this kind of theology does.
Sheila: Yeah. And I want to stress that too. This book is horrible. Okay. This book is garbage. This book hurts people. And this book is an extreme version of complementarianism. So it’s more extreme than Love and Respect, but it’s all the same part and parcel. As soon as you start saying that he gets to be an authority over her, all of this stuff does naturally follow. And so it’s not like you can have a healthy amount of it. Where is that healthy amount? If you look at a spectrum between egalitarianism or mutualism where you believe that both people serve one another and that both people are responsible to God and submit to God and then you look at the other end where men make all the decisions, where is the healthy point between those two points? If you’re arguing that complementarianism is okay, well, where is the healthy point? Because I would argue there is no healthy point unless both people matter.
Bethany: Yeah. Totally. And when I look at all of these things that I studies, so the devaluing of women, the normalizing control over them, the prioritizing eternal or spiritual value over, in the moment, physical safety, all these things are still implications and kind of the result of what can happen within this belief system. It’s just that Martha Peace really said this with her full chest and didn’t really try that hard to kind of code it in some other language. But those beliefs are still baked into that. So anything that justifies and spiritualizes the control of women by their husbands is going to be harmful even if you say that you’re more moderate and that this book is too extreme. That’s still the central belief. So that is going to expose women to an environment where coercive control is very likely.
Sheila: Yeah. Exactly. There are a couple of interesting concepts that you had in your thesis that I want to touch on. And one is this one. Seeing the wife as a training ground and how often that comes up. So you were talking, for instance, about that podcast clip where the guy—the woman would go—they would go into the social situation, and the woman would be the one initiating meeting people and talking to people. And the guy was like, “No. You need to stop doing that because I need to grow into this, and I need to learn it. And so you need to stop being who you are, essentially, and you need to start being shy and hold back so that I can be the one to come out.” And this happens throughout a lot of these books, which is okay. He needs to learn this, and so maybe God put you in this world to teach him how to do this. So he needs to learn patience, so maybe you are the one, who is going to teach him patience because you’re just going to endure. So you need to endure this because of what he’s going to learn. If he’s being abusive towards you, well, maybe God is trying to teach him something. And so you need to endure just as Jesus endured, so that he can learn the lesson that God wants to teach him.
Bethany: Yeah. Yeah. So if your personality traits or your strengths get in the way of creating space for your husband to practice those skills and exercise that, you really need to shrink yourself up, just clam that up, whether that’s extroversion in this one case where the husband said that his wife was so outgoing. And she always initiated the friendships, and they had to work on that. So it’s creating a problem out of something that wouldn’t be a problem but only is because she’s the wife.
Sheila: Right. Yeah. In most relationships, it’s like yay. Hey, we’re meeting friends. I’m so glad my wife is social because we’re meeting friends.
Bethany: Yeah. Yeah. And so that’s what I meant as the wife is the training ground for the husband. So she doesn’t get to exist in her full humanity and fullness if it doesn’t always leave space for the husband to develop that. Or, in cases of where she’s suffering or where she’s really struggling, even if she is experiencing distress, he needs to have that experience of working through his leadership abilities or trying to learn to speak more kindly. So she just has to deal with it because she is the training ground—her existence is the training ground.
Sheila: Right. Which is so scary. And I think this leads to the way that women’s attitudes are often portrayed in negative terms when they’re really not negative. The complementarian space is quite famous for mistranslating Genesis 3:16, which is, “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” And it was something which God told Eve was going to happen. It was not him cursing Eve. He was telling Eve what was going to happen which is like, “Look. You’re going to love your husband. You’re going to want to be with him, but he’s going to rule over you.” And the way that Focus on the Family interprets that verse, the way that Martha Peace interprets that verse is an interpretation that was started in the 1970s by a woman named Susan Foh. It was never out there before this which was that your desire will be to control your husband. And that really isn’t indicated in the text. There is a strange Hebrew word that’s used there, but it isn’t about that. But they’re saying that women’s basic drive is to control their husbands, and that’s women’s bent is to try to control their husband. And it’s like there is no evidence—looking historically what has been the big problem? Is it that women have tried to control men? Or is it that men have tried to control women? Just look at history. This doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, but this is what they teach. That women’s bent is to try to control whereas I think what’s going on is that women’s bent is to want to be treated like a person. But when you’re in a situation which requires women to be under men and women simply want to be treated as an equal that is called trying to control your husband.
Bethany: Yeah. That’s viewed as a threat when it’s just a personality trait of being outgoing or being decisive. Maybe you arrive at a conclusion earlier than your husband, but you need to carve out some space so that he can arrive to that conclusion. And I think the outcome of this ideology in that it devalues women but it elevates men to the point that it establishes and sets up even their preferences and their just natural desires as reflecting something that God wants. There was an example in it where the husband was very specific about how he wanted his breakfast and what he wanted. And to see the mental gymnastics that the wife went through of kind of assigning her husband’s preferences as being wisdom from God that God had imbued in her husband that she needed to glean from was so sad. And this woman had children. And yet, she was attributing so much significance and spiritual discipline and commitment to her husband’s mere preferences of how he wanted to order his day that it totally just undercut. Was that practical for her with children and taking them to school? And what about if she wanted to sleep in? Yeah. So devaluing women and then elevating even men’s just basic preferences as being—holding some kind of godly insight or wisdom. So you see just a huge disparity.
Sheila: Yeah. And then whenever she speaks up and whenever she has preferences, this is called insubordination. And you talked about this in your thesis too. “The use of the word insubordination suggests the standard is not whether she is helpful or supportive. The standard is compliance.” So if she’s not complying with what he wants even if what he wants is wrong, then she’s being insubordinate. So even giving an opinion in that situation would be insubordinate.
Bethany: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And this is where you can see that it really devalues women’s intellect. So they talk about how Martha and these other sources that I use talk about how you should submit to your husband even when you know that he is wrong. So then what does that tell you is the primary thing that they value? Submission, compliance, obedience, making yourself small as a woman. How is that any kind of successful way for a relationship to operate? That even if you know that your husband is wrong or there’s a better way to do something, you should zip it because you’re the wife. How does that lead to a thriving, healthy relationship where both people are valued and what they have to contribute, say, feel, and offer is equally valued. It reveals complementarianism for what it is is that both people are not equally valued.
Sheila: Yeah. And they would argue, of course—complementarians would say, no. We do value each other. We’re equal in being but not in function. Which—okay. As an aside, I’ve said this before. That argument actually makes no sense because the reason that she has to be under him and listen to his decisions is because she is a woman which is a function of her being. And so if it is her being, which means that she has different roles, and her being is something that can’t be changed, then she is, indeed, unequal because of her being. And she does have an—so you can’t—it just doesn’t make any sense. And, again, most complementarians do not operate this way. I am very aware of that. But my plea is that people would realize that by supporting this theology they are supporting something which goes right along with coercive control. And when you take it at its extreme, which is like The Excellent Wife, it’s like the The Association of—what is it? ACBC?
Bethany: Certified Biblical Counselors. Yeah.
Sheila: Certified Biblical Counselors, who promote Martha Peace. Things like John MacArthur’s Master’s University and Seminary, which promotes all of the same things. The Southern Baptist seminaries are starting to embrace biblical counseling and have turned away from licensed counseling and psychology. So when you’re in this milieu, which embraces this kind of teaching, you are going to get more coercive control because they’re the same thing. Telling women, hey, you need to listen to this authority. You’re not allowed to question it. If you question it, you’re sinning. Your suffering doesn’t matter. Your perspectives don’t matter, et cetera. And in Steven Hassan’s BITE model, which I couldn’t remember the thought one. It was thought. T. That I couldn’t remember, right?
Bethany: Yeah.
Sheila: Yeah. Okay. But I want to talk about the E. The emotions. And emotional control and how you’re only allowed to feel certain things. It’s just incredible how often in The Excellent Wife Martha Peace labels emotions as sins. So it’s sinful to feel hurt by his words. It is sin if you feel lonely. It is a sin if you desire kindness from your husband. It’s actually a sin because you’re using—you’re then giving—you’re making marriage into an idol. And so it is a sin to want anything better for yourself. And that is wild.
Bethany: Yeah. And then, again, she devotes so much—so many of her words in this book to illustrating the fearful outcome of when you don’t abide by God’s plan in submission. And so I feel like women in this ideology are just so twisted up in fear and all these things that can go wrong. And then I think about this level of emotional control and how valuable a licensed, clinical counselor is, a therapist is, in allowing and fostering a safe space where your emotions can be explored and validated and you can make those connections. And they can hold some of that pain for you, that suffering for you, while you explore these things, what value that brings. And then I look at what people like John MacArthur and Martha Peace—how they talk about those kinds of counselors and this plays right into a very powerful layer of isolation. So how do you have to go to? Let’s say you’re a woman, who is in a destructive, confusing marriage, and maybe you haven’t pinpointed that there’s abuse yet. If you cannot go to a licensed clinical counselor and you just go to an ACBC counselor, what are you going to get? It is a very self-contained system that just brings so much isolation. And isolation is such a key part of how coercive control functions. So it’s always a big red flag for me when I see churches that demonize and vilify actual, real psychotherapists and clinical counselors.
Sheila: Mm-hmm. Yes. If you’re not—or churches that say you’re not allowed to look at the Internet to see any criticism of us. Don’t listen to that person because she doesn’t believe what we believe about whatever. Politics, gender roles. Whatever it might be. Don’t listen to anything that she says about anything because she doesn’t line you with us 100%. And so if you’re censoring what people are allowed to read, that is part of the control model.
Bethany: Yeah. Information control. The I. Yeah.
Sheila: Mm-hmm. Exactly. And so that’s just—it’s scary. And, again, we are not saying that all complementarians are like this. I just want to say that again. But the theology does lend itself to all of the elements of coercive control. It just does. And if complementarians really want to protect women, it is on them to recognize that and to do something about it instead of just saying, “No. We’re the ones who protect women.” Because statistically, no, you don’t. You don’t. Women are more at risk in your model.
Bethany: Yeah. And I would say, too—so when I analyzed complementarianism— not the theology because I’m not a theologian but looking at it as a concept in the way that it was described and talked about and engaged with in sermons, in articles, in podcast interviews, it mapped so well onto coercive control. It was striking. Absolutely striking. And I think—so if you have these concerns and you recognize that there is a huge power disparity baked into your theology, what are the stop gaps that you have? What are the safety features that you have? The protective mechanisms that you have. One of them would be to give women an independent path out to a therapist that is not connected to your church, but they slam the door shut on that. Another path that could bring some safety would be talking about abuse and what it is and condemning it, but do they do that? No. Another pathway that could offer some protection is talking about divorce and not coming down and saying we prohibit divorce and not emphasizing so much these theologies around forgiveness and reconciliation and putting that above the safety and health of people in these destructive relationships. There are so many paths and ways that these churches and people who hold this theology—that they could walk down to bring more safety to their congregations, to these women, but so often they fail abysmally. And so it’s like a one-two punch.
Sheila: Yeah. I’m even struck by how often Martha Peace says you’re not allowed to talk—you’re not allowed to say anything about your husband to anybody. Or if you do, it has to be an older mentor and—or a pastor or a biblical counselor. And so you’re not allowed to let your family in on what’s happening. And for so many women who aren’t sure if it’s abuse, who are so confused, the only way that they can—they wouldn’t even know to talk to someone about is this abuse. They’re just confused, and they can’t figure it out. And the way that we normally figure things out is we talk to our friends about it. Is this normal? Is this what you go through? I’m really sad about this. Do I have a right to feel sad about this? Our first step isn’t usually, hey, my husband is abusive, and I need help. Our first step is usually I don’t know how to make sense of this. And for that, we usually just want to bounce off of our friends. And they say you’re not allowed to do that. In fact, there’s so many of these hyper reformed places that are trying to clamp down on women’s ministries or get rid of women’s ministries because what happens in women’s ministries? Women meet alone without men, and that’s where they often start talking about abuse. And I’m really struck by how many churches have gotten rid of women’s ministries and women’s Bible studies lately.
Bethany: Yeah. And, again, that’s that isolation piece that is part of coercive control. That is part of how you control someone. You cut off access to these other people that are outside of that group or even other people in that group that might have similar experiences. And the other thing too is why these books—Martha Peace’s books and these other groups fall so short of even when they denounce abuse and say that, of course, they’re against abuse is that they don’t understand how women in these faith based organizations and congregations how they disclose abuse. Because exactly like you said, they’re not going to right away be like I’m being abused. My husband is abusing me. They’re going to disclose in little drips to people around them. They’ll be expressing concerns. And they’ll often be marked by a sense of I’m not sure if this too much of a stretch, but I’m kind of wondering about this. Or my husband said this. And so when you make gossip and slander as Martha Peace does this big, bright red sin, it just adds so much fear that you can’t even go to another woman and express this situation where your husband—you felt humiliated by your husband or you felt belittled by him. And so you have the isolation. You have the control. And it’s so—it’s very much baked in. And yeah.
Sheila: I think about Josh Howerton’s church. We talked about Josh Howerton back in March when he gave that horrible quote unquote joke. I still don’t believe it was a joke. About how women need to stand where he tells you to stand, do what he tells you to do, and wear what he tells you to wear on his wedding night. So normalizing marital rape and coercion there. But in his church, they got rid of the divorce care ministry, which was looking after women who had gotten out of abusive marriages because they were afraid that it would—well, I’ve heard why, but I don’t know that officially. So maybe I won’t say that. But they’ve gotten rid of the divorce care ministry. We’ll just leave it at that. They’ve gotten rid of their women’s ministries largely saying that they—because they weren’t the same on each campus. That was the official reason. And so they wanted to just do big women’s events instead. So they’ve gotten rid of a lot of supports for women and a lot of ways that women could get together. And they’ve replaced it with tailgating parties for sports events and things like that. So, again, really isolating women. And this is something that’s really common in some of these big churches today is trying to get rid of women’s Bible studies, women’s events, women’s ministries in general.
Bethany: Yeah. And as a form, I would argue too, of information control. Shutting down that feedback that they could get from someone that might begin to validate their worries and concerns that they’re experiencing.
Sheila: Yeah. I want to play a clip from Steven Hassan, who created this BITE Model about—he calls it—he used to call it cults. About cults. But he’s now realizing that has a lot of negative implications and so now he says he calls it undue influence. So undue. Where someone has undue control over someone else. And I want to play this clip about how you go about getting out of something like this or figuring out if you’re in the middle of it because I think that’s the problem. A lot of us are confused, and we’re like is this me. Is this talking about me? And so here’s what he would say to that.
Steven: The question that people ask me often is, well, how do you know if you’re under undue influence or mind control or that you’ve been brainwashed. And what I say is you wouldn’t. That’s part of the dilemma because your operating system, your mind, has been co-opted, if you have been. And so for me, the answer really is you need to take a time out from the environment that you’re in and the people who are influencing you. You need to go to a separate geographical location and separate yourself from that. You need to study models of mind control and undue influence including Lifton’s model and the BITE Model. You need to deliberately seek out critical information about the leader, the doctrine, and the group or the people that you are involved with which is directly in contradiction to what the group tells you. Don’t talk to those people. They’re negative. Or don’t talk to those people. They’ve fallen away from God. Or those people are under Satan’s control. You want to find out for yourself and trust that you have the ability to know and to fact check whether or not things are true or not. And in that context, I ask people to reflect back when they first met the person or first met the group, what did they think they were getting involved with. And compare it with what they now know having been involved with the group for weeks or months or years and ask themselves the question, “If I knew then what I know now, would I have ever gotten involved?” And if the answer is not in a million years, then you know that you’ve been under undue influence. And congratulations. You’re on your way to freedom.
Sheila: That’s hard though to separate yourself, and he talks about getting away and reading critical stuff. And if you’re listening to the Bare Marriage podcast, you’re already doing that. So yay for you. Give yourself a hand. But it is hard when you’re in the middle of it to step back and really look at it critically. But I love that question. If you had known at the beginning what you know now, would you get involved? Would you adopt this?
Bethany: Yeah. And that’s so classic with these high control groups is that there is an initial bait and switch. So what you were promised does not turn out to be true. So Martha Peace says that this framework of submission promises protection. But it’s really a bait and switch. And I like to talk about why this is so important that we don’t invalidate and minimize our emotions because our emotions are the doorway to us being about to explore if something is happening to us that we are experiencing coercive control. And I like to talk about—so Steven Hassan likes his acronyms. I like my acronyms as well. So I like to talk about watching out for the FOG. F O G. So the F stands for fear. So if you are experiencing a sense of fear towards your partner, a sense of altering your behavior in order to avoid what you anticipate would be a reaction, there’s fear there if you’re altering your behavior. And then the O in FOG—the O stands for obligation. So the sense of even if you don’t want to do something you feel like you are compelled to. There’s a sense of coercion, an or else that is implicit in there. And the G stands for guilt. Do you feel like you are operating out of a sense of guilt and making decisions out of guilt? And then I know that this is an extra letter, but I would say C for confusion because confusion is such a common indicator that something is not right. And when someone is experiencing coercive control, the psychological abuse and manipulation leads very quickly to a very destabilizing sense of confusion. So I always say watch out for the FOG with the silent C for confusion. Fear, obligation, guilt, or confusion. And that’s why I disagree with Martha, and I think that we actually need to pay attention to our emotions. And we need to not invalidate them but listen to them and observe them because they could really be indicating something very serious that’s unfolding.
Sheila: Amen. Well, thank you so much. This is just really, really important for us to see. When you look at the two forms of marriage, one where you’re submitting and serving to one another while you submit yourselves to God and you pray for His will and you listen to God and one where women are told you need to submit yourself to your husband and listen to his voice. Which one sounds more like Jesus? Which one sounds more like Jesus? And I pray that churches will repent, honestly repent, of creating a system which has contributed to the abuse problem in our society and which has left women feeling like they have no choice. It’s wrong. And coercive control is wrong. And we need to stand up against these materials. We need to stand up against this theology. So thank you for joining us, Bethany. What’s next for you? What are you doing now?
Bethany: Well, I am doing some consulting. So for individuals or organizations that think that there might be a form of undue influence or coercion that’s operating within their systems, I’m doing consulting around that. And then I’m also doing education. So doing presentations to high school students, university age students because I want to help people potentially save themselves from decades of being forcibly controlled whether that’s in a group setting institutionally within a high control group or a church or interpersonally whether it’s in a one-on-one relationship. So yeah. Education and consulting is the path I’m running down right now.
Sheila: Awesome. Well thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it, and I really loved your thesis too. So thank you.
Bethany: Thank you so much. And I’ll just say too that people can check me out on my Instagram. It’s @freefromcontrol. And I help people kind of conceptualize coercive control by evaluating coercive control in the headlines or in pop culture or in different documentaries or pieces on Netflix to really help people ground their understanding of what coercive control looks like so that they can protect themselves and the people that they love. So they can check me out there as well.
Sheila: I love that. We will put a link to that in the podcast notes. So thank you so much.
Bethany: Thank you so much, Sheila.
Sheila: So appreciated her interview. This week on Facebook I’ve had a number of women say I really don’t think that it’s right that my husband is an authority over me, but I just can’t get away from the fact that that’s what the Bible says. And if that’s where you are at—because I get it. This is what you’ve been taught Scripture says your whole life. I really encourage you to take a look at the book How God Sees Women by Terren Williams. We had him on the podcast awhile ago. Go to Marg Mowczko’s website, which is just such an incredible resource for us. You can look up any Bible passage that you’re wondering about and see all the articles that she’s written on that Bible passage. Or listen to our podcast series that we did on the Danvers Statement. And you can see that this isn’t really what the Bible teaches. There are two different views. And one tells women that we get to follow Jesus, and one tells women that we don’t and that the way that we follow Jesus is by following our husbands. And you can pretty it up in other language. And you can say that’s not actually what we say, but, ultimately, it comes down to that. And my plea is that women would experience real freedom. And that men experience real freedom understanding that, guys, you aren’t responsible for whether or not your wife and kids follow God. You’re just responsible to point them to Jesus. And, women, you’re responsible to point those around you to Jesus too. And so let’s serve one another. Let’s love one another. Let’s treat one another as neighbors. Let’s have the mind of Christ, who emptied Himself of everything and served. And let’s do that together as we follow after Jesus together. And I think it would be a lot healthier. So take a look at our books, The Great Sex Rescue and She Deserves Better. It’s all about reframing our faith so that we find something which is life giving rather than life taking. And if you’re in a confusing situation and you really don’t know what to do, please listen. Please read some of these other materials and just know that God is not a God of confusion. And God is not a God of fear. And His yoke is easy, and His burden is light. And if your yoke isn’t easy and your burden isn’t light right now, maybe it’s because you’ve been taught about a false Jesus. So thank you for joining us on the Bare Marriage podcast. And we’ll see you again next week. Bye-bye.