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Hello my friends!

I’m sure you’ve heard Harrison Butker’s commencement speech he gave at Benedictine College or at the very least seen all the reactions to it. Last week, I provided what I consider to be one of the more important responses to consider from The Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica, who are founding members and sponsors of Benedictine College. You can read their response here.

The speech itself will not be the focus of today’s newsletter, but rather a definition of marriage the speech advocated. An definition that I have seen and experienced socially and politically my whole life as well as within the church. The idea that for Christians, the ideal marriage is when women stay home with the kids while the men go out and provide for the family. I’ll be writing about this topic from my personal experience, so I hope you hear it in the heart with which it was written.

But before we get to that, here are some resources I recommend considering directly related to this topic:

​-The Labor Of Love: Throughline Podcast.

There's a powerful value in American society: the value of the ideal mother. This mother is devoted to her family above all else. She raises the kids, volunteers at the school, cleans the house, plans the birthday parties, and cares for her own parents. She's a natural nurturer. And she's happy to do it all for free. Problem is? She's imaginary. And yet the idea of her permeates our culture, our economy, and our social policy – and it distorts them. The U.S. doesn't have universal health insurance or universal childcare. We don't have federally mandated paid family leave or a meaningful social safety net for when times get rough. Instead, we have this imaginary mother. We've structured our society as though she exists — but she doesn't. And we all pay the real-life price. This episode explores the history of this idea and the impact it has on our society.

​-Junia Project​

The folks behind this website have been doing really important work in the area of biblically based resources to undo many of the myths within the church that subjugate and minimize women. For today's topic, I highly recommend the article: 5 Myths of Male Headship by Kate Wallace Nunneley. It is both insightful and helpful.

​-Yes, Paul Really Taught Mutual Submission: Why Wayne Grudem’s interpretation of Ephesians 5:21 Is Untenable by Murray Vasser.

This is an excellent article that takes an exegetical approach to one of the most persistent and harmful interpretations of Ephesians 5:21 by Wayne Grudem, primarily in regards to submission.

​-The Role of Women In The Church​

Several years ago, I wrote a short piece on this topic, which you can read above. It also contains a lot more resources for further study.

Okay, onto today's content.
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How A Particular Definition of “Christian Marriage” Harms Others, Including Other Christians.

I came of age in the Evangelical Christian world. Both socially and theologically, it filled my teenage mind with beliefs that God’s original design called all of humanity to be married and have children. The commission to “go fourth and multiply” from the book of Genesis was seen as a mandate for every human being, but especially for every Christian married couple, rather than simply God’s call to the first ever human couple to propagate the human race.

As I remember how this passage was used and seeing how the planet now has over 8 billion people, I think we can safely conclude that this mandate along with “dominion over the earth” has been accomplished and we need to put our attention on more pressing issues facing the human race, like caring for the planet God created in ways that prioritize sustaining life, rather than business, far into the future.

By the time I turned 18, I not only believed that this was something I wanted so deeply but also I knew that if I didn’t achieve this goal, especially in the expected timeframe, like meeting a wife in college, I wouldn’t be fully accepted in my social circles until I did. The social expectations that came from this only continued to mount as time went on.

I ended up going through three degree programs without “finding a wife.” By the time I graduated seminary in 2012, I was 26, had been through a broken engagement, and was still single. This state of being seemed to panic my social circles as much as it did me internally. It seemed like a week wouldn't go by where someone didn't try to “fix me up” with their sister, niece, or granddaughter. I quickly started to feel like a project rather than someone to simply be loved in the place of life I was. Many of these fix ups were well meaning of course, but it seemed like that’s all people saw about me. I needed to be fixed.

These social expectations intensified as I entered into pastoring my first church. All through my theological education, it was made very clear to me by my social circles that pastors needed to be the epitome of “God’s original design.” Pastors needed to be married and their family needed to be examples for all other families in their churches. So I knew this was going to be a continued pressure as I stepped into the pastorate, but I wasn’t prepared for how demeaning it would actually be.

I would constantly have my masculinity, my sexuality, and my leadership as a pastor questioned by people. Some of the comments I would receive on a regular basis would be, “you just need to man up and ask someone out,” and “do you even like girls?” and “how can you lead a church when you can’t even lead a family?” My ability to officiate weddings and provide pre-marital counseling was also questioned often.

It was clear I could no more keep my dating life private than I could expect people to ask me more questions about how I actually felt about my singleness, especially as a pastor. It was pretty clear that these expectations of marriage and family was more important to many people in my social circles than I was as a person. I saw other single people in my social circles treated the same exact way as well. Singleness was so often treated as if it was a sickness to be cured.

This remained my experience until I met Rebecca in 2019. I was 34. Because we had both been through a lot in our previous relationships, we knew exactly what we desired from marriage and what we didn’t. We quickly discovered that we really wanted the same things out of marriage and life and most importantly, we were also madly in love with each other! So, we decided to get married in February of 2020.

To my surprise, I ran into yet another set of expectations in my social circles. Rather than being excited that I had met someone and fell in love, the response from many was more about how quickly we were getting married and what role she would be filling in the church. “February? Wow, that’s quick” some would say. Along with, “does she sing and play piano?” and “oh good, we need someone to lead children’s church!” It again made me hurt and angry that our individual experiences just seemed so ignored for the sake of arbitrary expectations. It didn’t seem enough that we were getting married. No, our marriage needed to fit a particular expected model. Nevertheless, Rebecca and I were so in love and couldn’t wait to start our lives together. Meeting her is the best thing that has ever happened to me.

Rebecca put herself through cosmetology school and had built up her own business here in Boise for more than 5 years by the time we met. She is now a salon owner and she is always booked out for at least several months. She loves her career and has wanted to do this work since she was little, just like I had always wanted to be a pastor. I admire the entrepreneur and leader she is, not only in her work, but in so many areas of her life.

Yet here again, we both ran into the expectations of the social circles we run in and even the expectations of legislators here in Idaho as well. The expectation isn’t just to get married and have children. No, the expectation is clearly get married, have kids, and the mother needs to stay home with the kids while the husband works full time to provide for the family. Not only would we get strange comments about both of us working and our childcare decisions for our son, we would also run into policies that reflect these expectations. Both in the politics of our state and in the churches I served.

The State

While it became almost impossible to buy a house where we lived in Boise and the cost of living soared, our state has also refused to put structures in place for working families, especially those with small children. For example, Idaho ranks 38th when it comes to the number of young children in school. Also, Idaho is one of only three states in the entire country that does not invest in an early childhood system. This results in childcare for young children being both incredibly expensive and hard to find. The cost of childcare just for our son is almost the same as our mortgage payment for our home. That’s more than $3,500 per month just for a house and childcare. With wages also not increasing, this is the equivalent to many individual's entire monthly full time income.

So families with small children not only struggle to find financial stability, even while both spouses are working full time, but they are also forced to make impossible decisions like, is it more cost effective for one spouse to quit their job to stay at home and not get ahead financially or continue working and still not get ahead financially? All in a state that tirelessly claims to be “pro-family.” This is just one example.

The Church

The structure of many churches seems to mirror this reality unfortunately. I had spent the first 5 years as a senior pastor after seminary making less than $20k a year while also being required to pay for my own health insurance. My church also mismanaged my compensation package in a way that I was taxed on more than I actually made and there were no policies in place for healthy financial discourse let alone for family leave. I had to work another job on top of my duties as a full time pastor and I still couldn’t afford to stay on top of my taxes, put anything away for savings, retirement, or pay down my student loans.

Even when I stepped into a different denomination with great family leave policies, health insurance, retirement, and much fairer compensation, the expectations from much of the church culture was still informed by this particular definition of family and I still needed to bring in extra income on top of my full-time job while feeling like I needed to put the majority of family care on Rebecca’s shoulders.

I cannot overemphasize how debilitating this finical situation can be, especially compounded by the expectation that the success of my church and building a family was solely up to me along with the unwillingness of the structures around me to actually try to understand our circumstances and adjust in a more helpful way.

A Dehumanizing Definition

This idolizing of the “family” not only dehumanizes women by expecting them to fulfill a very narrow definition of motherhood, but it denies very real economic and social realities that make it impossible for both spouses to not work full time if they want to afford to live. Just last week, someone with “Christian” in their bio commented on a recent post of mine and said, “I see your wife just had a baby. Why would you want her to go back to work and not stay home and be a loving mother to your child?”

This comment perfectly represents how out of touch this mentality is. It denies the needs we have as a family. It denies that my wife is a human being who is capable of being a mother and a career woman at the same time. It denies that we have both worked really hard to provide family leave for ourselves and denies that I share an equal role in the parenting of our children and making our home. It denies that we have organized our work life so that one of us will be home with our newborn daughter while the other is working. It denies and assumes so many things for the sake of enforcing arbitrary expectations.

A Christianity rooted in patriarchy will always define women first and foremost by their relationship to men.

A Christianity rooted in the gospel of Jesus will see women first and foremost as human beings created in God’s image.

May we understand the difference.

This mentality is also deeply out of touch from the values of many in my generation of dads (millennials). Here are just a few stats as an example:

• Stay-at-home dads: 70% more dads have chosen to stay home and raise children between 1989 and 2014
• Paternity leave: Post-birth bonding time is now seen as an integral part of fatherhood.
• Quality time: Millennial dads spend three times as much time with their children as previous generations.
• Child care: In 2016, fathers reported spending an average of eight hours a week on child care, about triple the time they provided in 1965.

As these stats make clear, people can’t tell us we don’t care about “family.” The true reality is, the economic and structural policies of states that claim to be “pro family” and even the structures in place in many churches show who actually doesn’t care about individuals and families.

Navigating this experience as a millennial and as a man, I have often thought how we were constantly told by so many in our Christian circles growing up to “prioritize family.” To not allow your kids to grow up in a “fatherless home.” Yet when millennials like myself try to prioritize our families, we find that there aren’t structures in place to support these “values.” We find a refusal to raise wages. We find a resistance to paid family leave. We hear “no one wants to work anymore” when we ask to work from home for a portion of the week so we can better prioritize our family.

I think this is why the idea that Christian marriage must operate by the wife staying home with the kids and the father being the only one to work is so offensive on so many levels. It not only denies the reality of what it costs to raise a family in our world today, but it simultaneously dehumanizes women by reducing them to one single role of homemaker while dehumanizing men and reducing them to the one single role of provider. We then expect women to mother like they don’t work and work like they don’t mother and we expect dads to be out working tirelessly to provide for their families then shame them for creating a “fatherless home.”

As a pastor, I also find this definition "Christian marriage" baffling because it is found nowhere in the Bible. It is something that is read into the Bible and then treated as if it is God’s mandate for all people. Ironically, many of the figures we read about all throughout the Bible would be seen as failures according to this model of family. Figures like Deborah the judge, Phoebe the pastor, Junia the apostle, Paul the apostle, and even Jesus Christ himself would have all failed the expectation of prioritizing getting married, having children, and governing their families by the framework of women staying home and men going out and "providing." If we are honest with ourselves, this model of "Christian marriage" is more built from ideals in 1950s American culture rather than the Bible itself.

It should also be noted that Rebecca and I are a straight white Christian family. I can guarantee that the experiences of female clergy, clergy of color, widowers, widows, single parents, divorced, LGBT people, and others who don't fit our demographic experience this harmful dynamic in far greater proportions than we did.

All this to say, if people want to live by this definition of marriage, where the wife stays home and the man works, more power to them. There is nothing wrong with people choosing that life for themselves and their families. That is totally their right to do so. The problem comes when this model becomes an idol for Christians. An idol used to judge and shame other people who don't and frankly can't fit that model and even create entire economic polices and church structures to impose such an ideal onto them. That is when these “values” become weaponized and cause a lot of hurt.

My prayer for us Christians in this time is that we are honest about the idols we have created in our definitions of "family" and collectively repent from them. My prayer is that we work to bring healing by getting to know the actual needs and circumstances of individuals and families and create structures that support them, rather than arbitrarily demanding that they fit some ideal. My prayer is that we actually love individuals and families more than we love our beliefs and expectations about what they should be.