#64: Where the Gospel Meets Sex

#64: Where the Gospel Meets Sex

Note: The Love Thy Neighborhood podcast is made for the ear, and not the eye. We would encourage you to listen to the audio for the full emotional emphasis of this episode. The following transcription may contain errors. Please refer to the audio before quoting any content from this episode. 

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AUDIO CLIPS: Love Thy Neighborhood… Discipleship and missions for modern times.

ANNA TRAN: Hey listeners, it’s Anna. So if you read the title of this episode, you know that we’re talking about sex. You know, our episode isn’t going to be rated NC-17 or anything, but it’s also not going to be rated PG either. So if you have young ears around, now’s your chance to grab some headphones or save this episode for later. The episode also includes content related to sexual abuse and betrayal, so please listen with care. 

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ANNA TRAN: Oh man, this is, um – how do I start this episode? 

JESSE EUBANKS: I think you just have to just, like, go for it. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Yeah, you just, I don’t know. You gotta go. 

ANNA TRAN: Just gotta go. Okay. Well, I think I’ll start with a wedding.

KATIE WOODY: I am 36. I think I kind of lost count after 30.

ANNA TRAN: So this is Katie Woody, and in 2012 she married her now husband Craig. You know, the wedding was super simple, there was a small ceremony, and it was filled with all the people that she loved. 

KATIE WOODY: That was the best part – people from childhood, high school, college. My brother and dad led parts of the ceremony. 

ANNA TRAN: She had her friends play the music that she loved, and she and her husband Craig, they said their vows. 

WEDDING CLIP: I present to you, Mr. and Mrs. Craig and Katie Woody. 

ANNA TRAN: You know, there was a lot of laughter, there were a lot of pictures, there was a relaxed dessert reception, and there was even, you know, a fun little sendoff. There weren’t any sparklers or rice or birds or anything, but people did throw candy.

KATIE WOODY: Nerds candy ’cause it was really colorful and fun. It was also kind of painful to get pelted with it, but it was pretty in the pictures. 

ANNA TRAN: And so they leave the reception, and they get a hotel. Obviously they’re both excited. They’re both virgins. They have both saved themselves for marriage. 

KATIE WOODY: I had all these friends that gave us a lot of advice. They were like, oh, we should go eat or we should take a shower. Someone had given us the advice to, like, lay a towel on the bed in case there’s bleeding. So, you know, it’s not like super sexy. 

ANNA TRAN: So it’s awkward to say the least. They were just trying to figure out each other’s bodies. 

KATIE WOODY: How does, like, that – like I don’t understand how that fits in because I’m a lot smaller than you are. (laughs) Yeah, it was a little bit shocking.

ANNA TRAN: But, you know, they get more comfortable with each other, they get going, their bodies are coming together, but then – all Katie feels is pain. 

KATIE WOODY: It felt like I was being torn or cut. It was very, like, sharp, intense kind of pain that I cannot ignore what’s happening with my body. 

ANNA TRAN: And this was definitely not the experience she imagined it to be. 

KATIE WOODY: I kind of had this perception of like, “I have saved myself and this is gonna be beautiful and that angels are gonna sing down upon us.” And, and it wasn’t. It was dark and terrifying.

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JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks, and I’m here with my wife.

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Lindsay Eubanks. Every episode we hear stories of Christians trying to follow Jesus in our modern times. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Today’s episode – “Where the Gospel Meets Sex.” And because of how broad this topic can be, in this episode we’re gonna be focusing specifically on sex within heterosexual marriages. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: We’ll be exploring our expectations of sex, how Christians are getting sex wrong, and how hopefully sex can be redeemed. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Welcome to our corner of the urban universe.

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ANNA TRAN: I think it’s safe to say that we live in a world that is obsessed with sex. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yep. Sex in commercials. 

AUDIO CLIP: When it gets hot, you act. Recharge.

JESSE EUBANKS: Sex in movies. Sex in music. Sex as identity.

AUDIO CLIP: Words that people use to describe their sexual orientation is ever changing…

ANNA TRAN: And these days churches are talking a lot more about sex too. There are sermons –

AUDIO CLIP: Sex is a good thing. We don’t teach that in the church…

ANNA TRAN: – books and even couples’ programs. 

AUDIO CLIP: Welcome to Ultimate Marriage. Today we are gonna be talking about… 

ANNA TRAN: Both the culture and the church have a lot of ideas about sex. You know, some good, some bad, and some even worse. And so of course we have to ask ourselves – with so much emphasis on it, what is the purpose of sex?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. You know, throughout history, humans have argued a ton about what sex is for. Is it just a natural appetite or animalistic passion? Is it just a self-expressive pathway to finding ourselves? 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: What about a Christian view? Is there a distinctly Christian view of sex? 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, you know, Christians have offered this other option. Like, contrary to this modern idea that sex merely requires consent, the Christian view is that sex actually requires covenants – you know, to give our whole bodies to someone, we also have to give our whole selves to someone. So the Bible calls this “becoming one flesh.” So just as a husband and wife have bound their life together relationally, they have also bound themselves together physically. So sex – the highest level of physical intimacy – is a reflection of marriage – the highest level of commitment – and it’s all a gift from God. 

ANNA TRAN: Yeah. There is a book by Dr. Dan Allender. It actually kind of has an arresting title. It’s called God Loves Sex, and in his book he talks about that sex is meant by God to be one of the bridge experiences between earth and heaven.

LINDSAY EUBANKS: So like the Christian view of sex and marriage – they’re meant to go together. They’re not separate.

JESSE EUBANKS: Right.

LINDSAY EUBANKS: So when sex is great, both spouses are making each other feel loved, accepted, known. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. And the first picture of this, it actually shows up all the way back in Genesis. So the first half of Genesis 4:1 says, “Now Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain.” Another translation says, “Now Adam made love to his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain.” 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: And the Hebrew root of the word “knew” in that verse is the same root in the Psalms when David writes in Psalm 139, “Search me, oh God, and know my heart. Try me, and know my thoughts.”

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. So when it talks about Adam knowing or making love to Eve in Genesis, it’s more than just physical. There’s also a spiritual knowing that happens. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Hang on a second. So back to Katie’s story. She said angels were going to sing during sex. What happened? 

ANNA TRAN: Yeah. Where we left Katie’s story was where she and her husband Craig were trying to have sex and throughout the honeymoon, each time they would try, Katie would feel this extreme pain in her vaginal area. Most times Katie needed to leave the room and gather herself because the pain was just so intense. 

KATIE WOODY: I need a minute, like going to the bathroom and trying to take a breath. I’m trying not to have a meltdown on my brand new husband. 

ANNA TRAN: Katie was feeling a lot of isolation and loneliness in the moments, and into the start of their marriage, each time they tried to have sex, it was never successful. Like neither of them reached orgasm, and it wasn’t for lack of trying. 

KATIE WOODY: We tried out different positions and I had went to my doctor, who told me that I was fine and I just needed to learn to relax and just drink some wine, and she gave me a prescription for Valium.

ANNA TRAN: So Katie had started seeing doctors because they quickly discovered that this amount of pain, it’s not normal. One doctor gave her a set of dilators. 

KATIE WOODY: So I would just start at like the, the smallest and try and try to work up and be like, “Okay, maybe, maybe it’s a little bit less painful today, maybe.” That was just something I dreaded all the time.

JESSE EUBANKS: This, I mean, this just sounds horrible. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: It sounds traumatic. 

ANNA TRAN: Yeah, this definitely wasn’t what either of them had hoped for in their first year of marriage, and it caused a lot of tension in their marriage. They would fight about things both related and unrelated to sex. 

KATIE WOODY: Kind of turned into like him believing that this was in my head and that I didn’t like him and I just didn’t wanna have sex with him. So I just felt very broken.

ANNA TRAN: And as time goes on, you know, a full year passes and she hasn’t told anyone about all of these struggles that she’s going through. She hasn’t told anyone about her pain, about, um, the arguments she and her husband are having. But eventually she just couldn’t hold it anymore. So one day after Thanksgiving dinner, Katie went up to her mom and told her everything.

KATIE WOODY: It was like the flood gates opened, like I couldn’t stop crying, and so I just, like, had poured out everything, all the feelings, all the hurt, all everything that had gone on in the first year. 

ANNA TRAN: And Katie said that was the first time she felt some sort of peace, you know, some sort of relief. And her mom listened to her, and Katie felt really heard and seen.

KATIE WOODY: And so I knew like, “This is real. Like this is not in my head. It’s not something I’ve made up. This is a real thing, and we need help.” 

ANNA TRAN: And so they slowly told a couple more people that they trusted about their struggles. They went on to see a lot of doctors. They started going to marriage counseling. And this continued on for more than three years.

KATIE WOODY: I mean, I wished for a long time that Craig would just bring home divorce papers. I was so tired and stressed, but I just wanted out. I just wanted to not be miserable, and I wanted him to go find, you know, go find someone that’s not broken. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: I’m just fighting tears over here. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Gosh. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. This sounds like a really hard place to be in.

ANNA TRAN: Yeah, it was a really dark time for them. This thing that was supposed to be a gift just felt like a black cloud over their marriage. But then one day, when they were at one of their doctor’s visits, that doctor said that he had a patient six years earlier that was diagnosed with something called vulvar vestibulitis.

JESSE EUBANKS: Wait, what is, uh, vulvar vestibulitis? What is that? 

ANNA TRAN: Yep. So a more formal definition would be severe pain during attempted vaginal entry, like intercourse or using tampons. Okay, so at the appointment, the doctor finds out that there are only two other doctors in the country.

KATIE WOODY: That dealt with that specific condition and offered surgery for it.

LINDSAY EUBANKS: I mean, that’s great news, but also the fact that the doctor had to search the whole country for some answers and only found two. 

ANNA TRAN: Yeah. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Wow.

ANNA TRAN: You know, they take action immediately. Katie and Craig – they fly out to Washington, D.C. from Texas, and they make an appointment with the doctor. But, you know, he’s on sabbatical.

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh no.

ANNA TRAN: But they’re able to meet with his assistant, who offered Katie a few options. One of ’em was –

KATIE WOODY: It’s a cream made out of chili peppers. Click on the scale of, like, one to 10. On heat, it’s like a hundred. You put it on, and it burns your area. So it makes it numb. (laughs) So yeah. So I said no.

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Rightly so. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh my gosh.

LINDSAY EUBANKS: It’s like cauterizing yourself. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. 

ANNA TRAN: Yeah. So hard pass. They did try other different types of numbing creams, hopefully to dull the pain. Still wasn’t helpful, but thankfully, you know, the primary doctor came back from his sabbatical. Did not suggest chili cream. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, good job, doctor. (laugh)

ANNA TRAN: Yeah, pretty good. And eventually he told Katie that she was a great candidate for surgery, and she decided to go for it.

KATIE WOODY: At our last appointment, the doctor did like a Q-tip test, and there wasn’t pain. Like both me and Craig are looking at each other like, “We can’t believe this. This is a miracle.” So (unclear) days in, we could actually consummate our marriage. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: So how many years is that? 

ANNA TRAN: That is around four and a half years. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Wow. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Wow.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so like, that’s it, right? You know, so they –

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Problem solved.

JESSE EUBANKS: Problem solved.

ANNA TRAN: Hooray, angels.

JESSE EUBANKS: Like they got to go and have like a bunch of great wild sex and everything was great, right? 

ANNA TRAN: You know, the angels might have sung down on them after the surgery, but that didn’t fix everything for them. They had gone through so many years of hardship. Even after a successful surgery, Katie still had this dark narrative about sex.

KATIE WOODY: Like sex is painful, sex is bad, it’s dirty, it’s embarrassing. And so for a long time was really one-sided, and not because he was making it that way. It’s just like I didn’t really think it was for me. It wasn’t something for both of us. I mean, after four years of pain, it is hard to turn that off. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Just from a biological standpoint, if you keep having pain with the same activity, what fires together wires together. So –

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah.

LINDSAY EUBANKS: – it’s going to become an activity that you want to avoid. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, and even though like not every woman has Katie’s condition, I do think, like, their story is not an uncommon story. I think that there’s always both physical and relational challenges in marriage when it comes to the topic of sex. I mean, it’s one of the big three. It’s like, “Let’s fight about money or kids or sex.” Katie and Craig’s scenario that they’re living through – it’s like, it’s so understandable. Let me ask this. Katie says, “Sex is bad, it’s dirty,” and, like, those are probably ideas that predated her being married. So my question is – where are Christians getting their ideas about sex? 

ANNA TRAN: Well, after the break, we will find out. Stay with us.

COMMERCIAL

JESSE EUBANKS: Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. Jesse Eubanks. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Lindsay Eubanks. Today’s episode – “Where the Gospel Meets Sex.” 

JESSE EUBANKS: Producer Anna Tran has been telling us about Katie Woody. Katie was diagnosed with vulvar vestibulitis, which caused her so much pain that she and her husband Craig were not able to have sex until a successful surgery after four years of being married. And even after the surgery, Katie thought that the sex could automatically fix their marriage, but instead, once the physical barriers were relieved, she discovered that they had other struggles in their sex life. So it’s fair to say that her expectations and her reality – they were not aligning.

LINDSAY EUBANKS: So what I wanna know is – where did Katie get these ideas about sex? 

ANNA TRAN: Right. Yeah, and I think we need to take a look at where Christians are learning about sex. And to answer that, I’m gonna tell you about a woman named Sheila. 

SHEILA WRAY GREGOIRE: I am Sheila Wray Gregoire.

ANNA TRAN: So Sheila’s a writer, blogger, and public speaker. She has spoken at conferences covering topics like Christian marriage, family, and, of course, sex. 

SHEILA WRAY GREGOIRE CLIP: That’s what sex is supposed to be. It’s, it’s a spiritual knowing of someone. Our society has taken sex and so perverted it that it has become mostly about the physical.

ANNA TRAN: So that’s a clip of Sheila from around 2009, and it’s on a Canadian Christian talk show called 100 Huntley Street.

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh, so 2009, like she’s been doing this for a while then. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: And clearly she’s not afraid to talk about sex publicly. 

ANNA TRAN: Right. So when she started her blog in 2008, she started to notice that people really engaged with the blog when she would write about sex.

SHEILA WRAY GREGOIRE: I talked a lot about how to show gratitude, how to be kind to one another, how to revive the romance, how to flirt, and what I’ve increasingly realized is that that’s, that’s kind of like putting a bandaid over things. 

ANNA TRAN: So back in the early 2000s, she and her husband were speaking at a lot of different Christian marriage conferences, and at the time one of the most popular Christian books on marriage was called Love & Respect by Emerson Eggerichs.

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh, yeah, yeah, I’ve heard of that. Uh, bestseller – I mean, probably sold millions of copies. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Yeah, I remember reading it. It was basically a marriage book helping couples communicate. 

ANNA TRAN: Right. And the main idea throughout the book is that love is a driving need for women and respect is a driving need for men. And when Sheila and her husband would speak at these conferences, they would sometimes recommend this book.

SHEILA WRAY GREGOIRE: Books that we were told by the conference organizers were really good and so I would hold up Love & Respect and I would say what a great book this was. I hadn’t read it, but everyone was saying it was a great book.

ANNA TRAN: Fast forward to 2019. Sheila has been writing about marriage and sex for over 10 years, and then one day she sees some Christians on Twitter arguing about sex. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, that is not hard to imagine at all. 

ANNA TRAN: Right. And particularly how Love & Respect talks about sex in the book. And she’s alarmed because, you know, she’s been recommending it for years, but what she’s seeing online doesn’t seem right. So she gets the book out, flips to the chapter on sex, and she reads this one line that really shocks her. 

SHEILA WRAY GREGOIRE: And what I read is, “If your husband is typical, he has a need that you don’t have.” 

ANNA TRAN: Alarm bells are going off in her head because throughout the chapter it so heavily emphasizes that men need physical release but it doesn’t mention other aspects of healthy sex.

SHEILA WRAY GREGOIRE: So nothing about intimacy. It’s just physical release. And if he doesn’t get physical release, he comes under satanic attack. Affairs are generally caused by women not having sex. And you need to sympathize with his struggles with lust if you expect him to have any sympathy for your body image issues. And that is the entire chapter. There was not a single word about the fact that women can feel pleasure, let alone should feel pleasure. 

ANNA TRAN: And just to put that line in context, this is a direct quote from the paragraph right before it – “A wife longs to receive her husband’s closeness, openness, and understanding. You can achieve this in two ways. One, do your best to give him the sexual release he needs, even if on some occasions you aren’t quote unquote “in the mood.” Or two, let him know you are trying to comprehend that he is tempted sexually in ways you don’t understand. As you allow him to talk about his struggles, you have all the more opportunity to be his friend as well as his lover. If your husband is typical, he has a need you don’t have.”

JESSE EUBANKS: Lindsay, what, what jumps out to you as you hear this passage from the book? 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Well, the last line – “he has a need you don’t have.” 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: So I have – I mean women have no sexual needs? 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, and men have all of the sexual needs? And, and even like the sense of, uh, like “a wife longs to receive her husband’s closeness, openness, and understanding” as if, like, husbands, husbands don’t want that? Like –

LINDSAY EUBANKS: They only need sex. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. Like what if the wife has the higher libido, you know? Uh, which happens plenty. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Okay. So now that she’s actually read the book, what did she do? 

ANNA TRAN: It was a turning point for Sheila. Soon after she read the book, she wrote a few posts on her blog, specifically calling out the problems she saw in the chapter on sex and also in the rest of the book.

SHEILA WRAY GREGOIRE: And I was inundated by comments, huge traffic.

ANNA TRAN: Hundreds of emails, direct messages, comments. And then she had a person on her team – 

SHEILA WRAY GREGOIRE: She’s an epidemiologist with a stats background. 

ANNA TRAN: – take the comments from the blog, social media, emails, and statistically analyze them. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Oh, so she’s not just rattling off her opinions. She’s actually doing deep statistical analysis of the situation. My kind of girl. 

ANNA TRAN: Yeah. And then the epidemiologist, she prepared a report. 

SHEILA WRAY GREGOIRE: She did a qualitative, systemic, and systematic analysis of it, and we sent that report to Focus on the Family because they published Love & Respect and they promote it. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh my gosh. So this is like a big deal, you know, dropping your findings on the doorstep of, like, such a massive Christian organization. Like, it feels like a little bit like a, like Luther, you know, nailing his 90 theses to the door of the church, but they’re like, they’re like sexy theses. (laughter)

LINDSAY EUBANKS: So what happened when she sent it? 

ANNA TRAN: Well…

SHEILA WRAY GREGOIRE: They never got back to me. They didn’t even reply. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh, well that was like a buzz kill. 

SHEILA WRAY GREGOIRE: And so we thought, “Well, they can ignore a few hundred women, but can they ignore 20,000?” And so we decided that we would just try to do the biggest study that’s ever been done of evangelical women to see how these messages impacted people’s marriage and sex lives.

ANNA TRAN: So Sheila and the epidemiologist on her team brought on a third person, who is Sheila’s daughter actually. 

SHEILA WRAY GREGOIRE: She is a psychometrics grad. She did a lot of work in stats and in survey development in her undergrad. 

ANNA TRAN: They began this really big scientific endeavor to specifically answer this question – do our evangelical resources for sex and marriage point readers to healthy relationship dynamics or unhealthy ones? So they developed the survey to really high academic standards, and they used scientific methods to analyze the data. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Wow, like the, this is like a huge undertaking. Uh, like how many Christian women have ever been surveyed about their sex lives before?

ANNA TRAN: I mean, this is the first one. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Did they really get 20,000 responses?

ANNA TRAN: They actually got over 20,000 responses. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Wow.

JESSE EUBANKS: Whoa. That’s crazy. 

ANNA TRAN: Yeah. The majority of the responders were women ages 25 to 60, most of which identified as evangelical. Sidebar – Sheila told me this pretty funny thing that happened. There’s this website – it’s called SurveyMonkey. It’s probably the most popular and biggest survey website available on the Internet.

SHEILA WRAY GREGOIRE: Like we broke SurveyMonkey. Our survey was so big that we couldn’t download our results. They had to manually download them for us. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh my gosh. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: They broke the internet. (laughter)

JESSE EUBANKS: That’s incredible. Like SurveyMonkey literally exists – it’s like one of the premier platforms to do surveys, and they broke it with their sex survey. That’s amazing. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: With Evangelical Christian women.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, this is so great. This is like a, like a bad joke. That’s great. 

ANNA TRAN: Yeah. Okay, so I wanna share with you some of the findings from the survey. Let’s take a look at two different sections of the study. So the first section I wanna share is about women’s beliefs before and after marriage. So the study actually identified harmful messages they repeatedly saw in popular evangelical books on sex and marriage. So in the survey, women were told what these four messages were, and then they were asked if they believed this teaching before marriage and then if they still believed it after now being married. So, Lindsay, can you help me read these? 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Sure. 

ANNA TRAN: Okay, so the first one is –

SHEILA WRAY GREGOIRE: “All men struggle with lust. It’s every man’s battle.” 

ANNA TRAN: 79% reported believing that before being married.

LINDSAY EUBANKS: 62% said they believe this currently. 

ANNA TRAN: And second –

SHEILA WRAY GREGOIRE: “A wife should have frequent sex with her husband to keep him from watching porn.” 

ANNA TRAN: 40% reported believing that before.

LINDSAY EUBANKS: 18% said they believe this currently.

ANNA TRAN: Third – 

SHEILA WRAY GREGOIRE: “Boys will push girls’ sexual boundaries.” 

ANNA TRAN: 88% reported that before.

LINDSAY EUBANKS: 81% said they believe this currently. 

ANNA TRAN: Then, Sheila found this troubling message showing up more frequently than any of the others.

SHEILA WRAY GREGOIRE: The biggest one was this obligation sex message, this idea that you’re obligated to give your husband sex when he wants it. 

ANNA TRAN: 39% reported believing that before.

LINDSAY EUBANKS: And 21% said they believe this currently.

JESSE EUBANKS: I mean, I can definitely attest personally to hearing this teaching in various forms through the years. You know, Lindsay, like what stands out to you about these statistics and the messages associated with them?

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Well, all four of them were things I believed, especially as a young Christian woman and a young married woman. I didn’t even realize I believed ’em until somebody pointed it out. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. Which means that, like, these messages were clearly coming through in the circles that we ran in and in the, the –

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Right. And it wasn’t explicit like from the pulpit necessarily, but there were just these underlying cultural norms, so to speak, that were kind of just understood.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: To be the, you know, the, the really good Christian girl. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Or the really good Christian wife.

ANNA TRAN: So you can see that these messages coming from within Christiandom were harming people. So much of the teaching was centered on women serving men and on males having this uncontrollable sexual need. And that actually leads to the second section of the study I wanted to talk about, and this section has to do with women’s sexual satisfaction.

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Ooh, sign me up for this section. 

JESSE EUBANKS: (laughs) Simmer down. Simmer down. (laughter)

ANNA TRAN: Alright. While studies have shown that men are found to reach orgasm 95% of the time, Sheila found that under half of these 20,000 women, 48.7% say that they reach orgasm all or almost all the time. So this means that generally over nine out of 10 men reach orgasm consistently while less than five outta 10 women do.

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh my gosh. That is a huge gap. 

ANNA TRAN: Yeah, so that phenomenon is actually known as the orgasm gap. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: That’s not a gap. That’s a chasm. (laughter)

JESSE EUBANKS: The orgasm chasm. (laughter)

ANNA TRAN: The or-chasm.

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Or-chasm. (laughter) There you go, Sheila. There’s your second book. Or-chasm. 

ANNA TRAN: Essentially men are experiencing a lot more orgasms than women.

LINDSAY EUBANKS: And then husbands wonder why women don’t wanna have sex as often.

ANNA TRAN: Hmmm. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Hmmm. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And so this is clearly showing like women are not getting as much out of sex as men are. 

ANNA TRAN: Yeah, and this goes back just to, you know, all of those messages that Sheila was talking about.

JESSE EUBANKS: Like everybody is thinking, “Sex is for men, and it’s not for women.” Or if it is for women, women are the ones that have to, you know, serve, but it’s not about women receiving or especially, like, receiving pleasure.

SHEILA WRAY GREGOIRE: A lot of these messages that people internalize about sex in the evangelical church – we don’t hear them from the pulpit. Where we hear them, it’s reading magazines, and it’s especially reading books or women’s Bible studies. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: I remember reading these books in college, like Lady in Waiting, which was basically “be the prim and proper woman and then your, your man will come and find you and you will attract purity because you are pure.”

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Kind of that kind of message. And Every Man’s Battle. That already set me up.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah.

ANNA TRAN: So then, after the study was done and the data compiled, Sheila and her team put it together in a book called The Great Sex Rescue. 

SHEILA WRAY GREGOIRE: For years, I had been giving advice, which was good – it was good advice on how to make your sex life better – and people still had all the same problems. And I started to realize maybe it’s because of this – maybe it’s because we have given people in evangelical circles a totally wrong picture of what sex is.

JESSE EUBANKS: So if Katie and Craig’s story is like an example of the physical barriers that can stifle good sex and then Sheila’s story is an example of Christians believing harmful things about sex, like where does that leave us? You know, what does good sex look like? How can it even be redeemed? 

ANNA TRAN: Well, the good news is – there is hope. So, stay with us.

COMMERCIAL

JESSE EUBANKS: Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. Mr. Eubanks. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Mrs. Eubanks.

JESSE EUBANKS: So today producer Anna Tran has been taking us through the electric minefield of sex. We just explored a study about the sex lives of more than 20,000 Christian women, some of the harmful teaching being promoted by Christians, and the massive gap in orgasms between men and women. And before the break, I asked Anna two questions that I still want an answer to – what does good sex look like, and how can it even be redeemed? 

ANNA TRAN: Right. The Bible says that we as Christians are to walk in the light like Jesus walks in the light, and in order for sex to be redeemed, it first has to be brought into the light. So I wanna tell you a story about what this looks like, and the conversation I had started with me asking the question – “How was sex talked about in your family?”

CLIFF ROTH: I’m not avoiding the question. I really mean we didn’t talk about it. That’s the message I took even into adulthood. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Hey, wait a second. Who is that? I know that guy.

ANNA TRAN: Yeah, you know him. So this is Cliff Roth. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: What’s up, Cliff? 

JESSE EUBANKS: Hey, Cliff. 

ANNA TRAN: He is the executive director of a local ministry here in Louisville. And growing up, the very, very rare times sex was mentioned –

CLIFF ROTH: It was brought up as a biological reality. It was not brought up as a relational reality. 

ANNA TRAN: And, you know, even though it wasn’t talked about at home, that didn’t mean that Cliff was totally ignorant. Like so many other people, Cliff’s sex education was basically from school and peers and self-education.

CLIFF ROTH: And I had already explored my sexuality but did not have any context for what it was, so I felt a shame around it somehow. 

ANNA TRAN: And that shame and guilt – it really persisted throughout life as he got older. And so, fast forward, Cliff is around 22 at this point. He is in seminary. He is getting ready to become a pastor. He’s engaged to be married.

CLIFF ROTH: I was living in an apartment with some college friends, and there was a, uh, a woman who lived above us who would often be on her porch. 

ANNA TRAN: So whenever Cliff would get home, he and that woman would make some sort of eye contact.

CLIFF ROTH: And I felt something – you know, I felt this, this sort of sexual arousal in my body and that began to be something that was like happening regularly and I was freaking out about like, “This is not okay.”

ANNA TRAN: And, you know, to be clear, nothing physical happened. They didn’t even have any conversations. They didn’t even talk. But –

CLIFF ROTH: It was more about just this fantasy of “what if,” you know, or “I think she wants me. Uh, she’s looking at me. She must want me.”

JESSE EUBANKS: Like, this is, like, not to throw shade at Cliff at all. Like this is like such a man thing is like, “Oh, she was nice to me. She must want to, like, jump my bones.” You know, it’s like so silly. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: That is exactly what I thought. I was like, “Okay, that is not what I would’ve thought in that moment.” 

JESSE EUBANKS: And, and again, like, I – you know, I’ve done that. Like, it’s like, it’s such, such a silly – 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Have you now? 

JESSE EUBANKS: Uh, not recently dear. No. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: (laughs) Just teasing. 

ANNA TRAN: Just to give you some context for the situation too, um, Cliff told me about some of the struggles that he had with his father growing up, about, like, the lack of affirmation that he received from his dad.

CLIFF ROTH: I never got it, and I found something arousing about thinking a woman wanted me. That was like an easier, like easier narrative. 

ANNA TRAN: Eventually he and his fiance got married, and now sex isn’t a far-off fantasy. It’s part of his marriage. 

CLIFF ROTH: Sex is only allowed in marriage, so because of the way I’ve been taught. So, like, I can do this thing now, and, and I can do it legally, uh, and not feel guilt and shame. So I thought. 

ANNA TRAN: But Cliff’s view of sex was really tainted by the use of porn in the past, and that shame came with not knowing how to approach sex rightly.

CLIFF ROTH: I kind of had an expectation of sex and marriage that I would get this reward of sex without having to do the work of relationship with my wife. I didn’t see the two as congruent or running together. I just saw, “We have sex, we do marriage.” Those are two different kind of buckets. 

ANNA TRAN: So essentially Cliff, without realizing it, has compartmentalized sex and marriage. They are not integrated at all. 

CLIFF ROTH: I saw myself as a husband, and then I saw myself as this man who wanted to have sex. Those were two different things to me. I was a good husband. I was trying the best I could to be, uh, to be a good man, you know. I had so much toxic shame around sexuality, around my identity as a sexual being. I didn’t have that much toxic shame around being a husband. I felt pretty good about that. 

ANNA TRAN: And then, as time went on, you know, the shame that Cliff was feeling was compounding, and that showed up when he and his wife would have sex. 

CLIFF ROTH: She would feel my lack of presence in sex. I was this man here, but then I was this, like, empty shell here acting, you know, when we had sex.

ANNA TRAN: And at this point in the story, one thing you need to know is that Cliff was addicted to porn. He hasn’t really told anyone about this. At the same time, you know, he’s a pastor and there are other people in the church also struggling with porn. And so what he found is that when he would sit down with them and would listen to their own stories –

CLIFF ROTH: I would tell parts of my own story. I would tell little chunks, and I would tell different chunks to different people. And as I did that, I began to feel a sense of freedom in my body, like I would – “Oh, that felt good to say that out loud. I’ve never told anybody that.”

ANNA TRAN: So Cliff was finding, you know, a little bit of freedom in telling parts of his story, and it was, you know, helping him work through his addiction.

CLIFF ROTH: I was doing well in a sense of, like, my addiction was sort of dormant during those, those years. And I, I was pastoring, so it was like super high stakes. 

ANNA TRAN: And they’re also counseling other people in how to, you know, become free from porn, but he himself is experiencing this addiction. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: I could see where that would even help him compartmentalize even more.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah.

ANNA TRAN: So all of this is happening, he still feels a lot of shame and guilt, but he still hasn’t told anyone his full story. But then in 2016, he goes to this conference in North Carolina. 

CLIFF ROTH: It was called the Set Free Summit in Greensboro, North Carolina, and I was like, “Oh, I need to go to that.” I bought two tickets, thinking another pastor would go with me. I asked about 16 pastors that were on staff. No one could do it or wanted to do it. 

ANNA TRAN: He doesn’t get a pastor to go with him, so he asks his wife. So he and his wife go to this conference, and the whole time he’s thinking, “I’m gonna help people.” 

JESSE EUBANKS: So, like, he’s still just like, “Oh, this is, like, for other people. This really isn’t for me.”

ANNA TRAN: Right. But then, at one of the main sessions, they showed this video. So the video starts off – this guy is underwater.

CLIFF ROTH: Trying to do something heroic, but got his – got a rope caught on a rock and couldn’t get loose. And he had a knife in his boot – he could have cut the rope – but he just started pulling harder, and the harder he pulled, the tighter the, the knot was. And he’s under the water, like dying, like he’s going to drown.

ANNA TRAN: But then the guy, he realizes that he has a knife on him and he can just cut himself loose. 

CLIFF ROTH: That image of him pulling harder and almost drowning, um, just wrecked me because I knew that was, that was my story. I had broken down, like just started crying. 

ANNA TRAN: And, you know, his wife is there with him and she looks over at him and she asks him –

CLIFF ROTH: “Is this you?” And I knew that that was a moment, this is my defining moment to tell the truth of who I am and to finally find a way out, a way to breathe, a way to, to live, not experience this death that I feel around sex and Heidi and the shame. 

ANNA TRAN: You know, Cliff gets up, and he goes to the table of the ministry that showed the video. He finds someone there, and Cliff tells him his whole story. And what ends up happening is that this person came alongside Cliff.

CLIFF ROTH: Who became for me a friend, a person who journeyed with me and who gave me so much space and language and understanding ’cause he’d walked this path too. 

JESSE EUBANKS: He found somebody that’s like, “Hey, I’ve been where you are, but man, there’s a way out of this,” and he walked with him through it. 

ANNA TRAN: Yeah. There was someone available to want to talk with him about it. They weren’t afraid of talking about sex. It wasn’t taboo for them. So he found a safe place to talk about sex. 

CLIFF ROTH: I think that, that frankly it was, it was – I think we can safely say that up until that moment I had not experienced the power and the beauty and the freedom of what it means to be a sexual man, like at least tasted the way that God intended. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: So are we saying, like, his sexuality was fully healed? 

ANNA TRAN: No, this was just a turning point for Cliff. It was like the start of a journey of healing for him that has continued on to today. 

CLIFF ROTH: The healing that I felt in those moments, uh, was just profound, and, and the, the way that we engaged sexually following in those next months and years, you know, really was radically different than what we experienced in those first 10 years of marriage.

ANNA TRAN: So after all of the, the struggles and, you know, the difficulties, Cliff and his wife were finally able to begin to experience sex in the way that it was intended to be.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so I think that, like, Cliff, he and his wife, like, turned this corner for the better, and, you know, one of the things that we’re still sort of trying to figure out, right, is like – what does healthy sex look like? You know, are there any tips or criteria that husbands and wives can implement to make their sex lives healthier and better for both spouses?

ANNA TRAN: Well, you know, Sheila has a ton of very specific advice to make sex better. Do you wanna hear it? 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Yes.

ANNA TRAN: Just kidding. (laughter) Sorry, we can’t really repeat all of that. Um, we would get slapped with an explicit label. I’ll just let the listeners read her book for that content. However, here are a few tips from Sheila that I can share. She developed seven principles for Christians to engage in healthy sex. Okay, here are Sheila’s seven principles for healthy sex. Okay, so let’s do this. How about we rotate reading these? 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay.

ANNA TRAN: Jesse, you can start. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Alright. Number one, sex should be personal. Uh, Sheila says it’s a chance to enter into each other’s very being to truly become one. It’s a knowing of each other that leads to deep intimacy. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Number two, sex should be pleasurable. Sex was designed to feel really good for both people. 

ANNA TRAN: Number three, sex should be pure. Both partners can expect the other to take responsibility to keep themselves free of sexual sin. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Number four, sex should be prioritized. Both partners in the relationship desire sex, even if at different levels, and both partners understand that sex is a vital part of a healthy marriage.

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Number five, sex should be pressure-free. Sex is a gift freely given. It is not about getting what you want through manipulation, corrosion, or threat. 

ANNA TRAN: Number six, sex should put the other first. Sex is about considering your spouse’s wants and needs before considering your own. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And finally, number seven, sex should be passionate. Sex was designed to allow us to enter into a state of joyful abandon, to completely surrender ourselves to the other in an ecstasy of trust and love. 

ANNA TRAN: Okay, so to recap, healthy, life-giving sex in a marriage should be personal, pleasurable, pure, prioritized, pressure-free, put the other first, and passionate.

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Hold on. I’m thinking about that list, and I’m thinking some people could be discouraged. What if they don’t have those markers of a healthy sex life? 

JESSE EUBANKS: Like what if a couple, like, only has, like, a few of those things, or, like, what if they have, like, none at all? 

ANNA TRAN: Right, those are all great questions. I mean, thinking back to the stories we heard today, you know, a healthy and enjoyable sex life doesn’t happen overnight. You know, at the end of the day, the actual action and experience of sex is only part of what contributes to a healthy sex life. And for Katie, it’s taken a while for her to accept that sex is a good thing for herself and learning to speak up about her own needs is part of building a healthy sex life. 

KATIE WOODY: “Hey, these are things that I want. This is what I need today.” So it’s taken 10 years for – like, just in this past year – for me to say, “This is not just for him, this is for both of us, and it is only good for our marriage if it is a partnership.” So I’m just now to the point of like, “I can enjoy this, and this is good for me and good for us.”

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I think even, uh, about the term, you know, “sex life” – like it’s not just about intercourse. You know, so much of the other parts of life affect what sex is like. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Right. Sex is so different once kids come into the picture and stress from work and sometimes you have health concerns, and even, you know, past history, past sexual experiences can affect you in the bedroom. 

ANNA TRAN: Exactly. You know, and trying to check off all those boxes of a healthy sex life would be a backwards approach according to Sheila.

SHEILA WRAY GREGOIRE: Rather than making some perfection of a sex life your goal, instead make chasing after your spouse and enjoying your spouse and serving your spouse your goal, and the rest will fit into place a lot better.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so we’ve heard all these stories, and I think that just leaves us with the need to answer this question – how does the gospel transform sex? 

ANNA TRAN: Yeah, I think a lot of times we can look to sexual fulfillment as something that’ll save us or heal us. And, you know, in talking with Cliff, he mentioned how oftentimes people when they get married, not only do they marry someone they love, but they also marry someone who activates their deepest wounds.

CLIFF ROTH: Because we think they’re gonna heal them, and that reality is often expressed in, in married sex. There are healing components about great sex. But at the end of the day, we are in a relationship with someone who, in our intimate, vulnerable moments, reminds us of our deepest wounds. And if we’re looking for sex to heal those deepest wounds, it’s simply not going to do it. It doesn’t do it before we get married. It’s not gonna do it after we get married.

JESSE EUBANKS: You know, I think about how in the culture we live in – you know, there’s hookup culture, there’s hypersexualized fixations, there’s porn use – sex is so often used for individual self-fulfillment. It’s about personal pleasure, and it doesn’t even require a commitment to the person that you’re having sex with. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Right, but the Christian view commands mutual service and commitment to the other. 

JESSE EUBANKS: When we can bring profound commitment and profound intimacy together in a relationship – emotional, spiritual, physical intimacy – in that moment, we experience the joy of loving and being loved, of two people lost in each other, a timelessness like eternity. You know, the type of delight that we experience – I think Dan Allender was right. It’s a foretaste of heaven.

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ANNA TRAN: If you wanna find more resources on this topic, a good place to start is in our show notes. Cliff and his wife actually teach regularly on sex. They lead workshops they call Sexual Health Intensives to help other people have healthier sex in their marriages. So for more info on the workshops and to learn more about Sheila’s book and survey, check out the links in our show notes.

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JESSE EUBANKS: Special thanks to our interviewees for this episode – Katie Woody, Sheila Gregoire, and Cliff Roth. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Our senior producer and host is the amazing Jesse Eubanks. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Our co-host today is my wife, the beautiful Lindsay Eubanks. Anna Tran is our podcast producer, writer, and who the other day asked me to watch her hermit crab, who got a little too frisky with a pillow.

SHEILA WRAY GREGOIRE: He doesn’t get physical release. He comes under satanic attack. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: Audio editing and engineering by Jason Rug. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Music for today’s episode comes from Lee Rosevere, Poddington Bear, and Blue Dot Sessions. Theme music and commercial music by Murphy DX. 

LINDSAY EUBANKS: If you want a hands-on experience of missions in our modern times, come serve with Love Thy Neighborhood. We offer internships for young adults ages 18 to 30 through the areas of service, community, and discipleship. You’ll grow in your faith and your life skills. Learn more at lovethyneighborhood.org. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Which of these was a neighbor to the man in need? The one who showed mercy. Jesus tells us, “Go, and do likewise.”