Over on my Substack a while ago I freaked out my subscribers by divulging, in ominous tones, that I would be doing a “deep dive” into the content of Sheila Gregoire. I am not very fond of the expression “deep dive” because, really, how deeply can anyone go into any particular subject these days when all of the discourse and argumentation is so very on the surface? Reading blog posts and listening to podcasts is not like swimming in the ocean or a glacier lake. One dips in and dips out of the shallows without becoming altogether immersed in whatever the subject might be. More like a “desultory dip” than a “deep dive.” Still, hitting play on podcast after podcast does make the assumptions and priorities of the expert, or influencer, or whatever reverberate through the intimate trials of the day. Gregroire’s voice, as well as that of her daughter, has become the background of my laundry folding and vacuuming.
Much of what Gregoire advocates is mere common sense. Marriage is a partnership. Bad sex is the symptom, not the problem. Husbands and wives should play fair in communication and household tasks. Small problems will become big ones over time if they’re not resolved while they’re small. If you don’t tell your husband that you feel disrespected when he refuses to join you at the dinner table the very first time he does it, eventually you will either fly off the handle and leave him, or just fly off the handle. That sort of advice is useful for almost every occasion. The fact that it seems novel says a lot about the wreckage of our civilization. If you have to listen to an hour-long podcast about how to be a human person in a human marriage, what hope is there for anyone?
Beyond the proverbial common sense of much of Gregoire’s content, there are some serious and grating problems. The number of them, for me, is growing, but one in particular is uppermost–she doesn’t sound like a Christian.
I’ve read two books and listened to, by now, about ten podcast episodes, and the spiritual substance of marriage, for Gregoire, is ankle-deep if not a dry and parched river bed. Most people who would define themselves as “complementarian”–putting to one side the merits or shortcomings of that particular term–would see themselves as living within a spiritual realm. The earth isn’t just a mass of geological substances. The person isn’t just a random amalgamation of fluids and hormonal processes. At the back of it all, there is a God with some kind of genius who designed both the human creature and the earth according to an unseen, spiritual paradigm. There is a correspondence between the temporal and the eternal. There is an order and an everlasting hope. The body, in other words, has a soul inside it. That soul belongs to God. The soul will go on forever. The body will fall into the ground until Christ returns. Then it will be remade. In the meantime, your body, if you are a real Christian and not a secularist masquerading as one, houses not only your own spirit but the very Spirit of God. This eternal spiritual condition brings certain values to the fore–obedience, faith, discerning, and then bending, to the will of God.
I feel like this is so obvious it’s almost embarrassing to write it out, but for Christians–that is people who obey and follow the Lord Jesus–their temporal happiness, even in marriage, is not the most important consideration. It’s not that it doesn’t matter, it just doesn’t matter as much as being on the right side of the God of the universe. You can cash in all your chips and have everything you want now, or you can cling to Jesus, forgoing more immediate desires for the promised consummation of his eternal love.
This transcendent and eternal consideration, of course, makes Christians reviled in a world where temporal happiness is the highest and best value. But it is also the reason no serious Christian should listen very carefully to Gregoire. Among many theological casualties that lie abandoned by the podcast editing process and guest schedule, she treats both divorce and sex before marriage as neutral at best, or, in many cases, good, and not having any particular spiritual consequence. Whether or not someone is justified in getting a divorce (many times such a decision is well-justified), the question of sex still has to fit in the boundaries of the Christian faith–if you are a Christian. And the relationship between the husband and the wife, how it is manifested and exhibited to the world, is constrained by the peculiar analogy of Christ and the Church.
Christians who think and write about marriage and sex should try to sound like Christians, and not like atheists or consumerists or pagans. That’s all I’m saying–for now. There’s still a good mile to go before I assemble all my thoughts.
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