He is telling a woman married to a harsh and unloving man (a classic description of an abusive husband) that she must respect him (do the things included in the acronym CHAIRS), and when she does, a billion angels celebrate. Even if others warn her that this advice is “stupid”, and even if she instinctively realizes this will only make the situation worse (as it did not for the two women’s stories mentioned above, and for many of my survey respondents), she must disregard that feeling. Rather than confront her husband in his sin, she is to endure his harsh and unloving behaviour (his abuse) as service to God.

This, quite frankly, is terrible and dangerous advice, and goes against the plurality of published marriage advice about enabling bad behaviour and growing intimacy. It also goes directly against the Southern Baptist Convention’s new resolutions about caring well for those in abusive marriages.

More importantly for this conversation, though, it contradicts many, many other authors that you have featured on your radio show. Henry Cloud and John Townsend, for instance, say that this type of advice is bunk. In their books about boundaries, they show how “respect” of the kind Eggerichs instructs is both untenable and unbiblical, and then they instruct people to stop interrupting the Law of Sowing and Reaping so as to allow the offender to bear the consequences for his misdeeds. At the end of the book Boundaries in Marriage, Cloud and Townsend also directly address the theology that is used in Love & Respect and show why this view of submission, which states that a woman must bear with sinful and harsh behaviour, is wrong.

You also feature Leslie Vernick, who explicitly teaches that saying very little to the spouse and expecting change will do nothing but enable the problem to continue. Gary Thomas has also stated that enabling bad behaviour is wrong: if you love someone, you wouldn’t want them to continue in sin. Thus, he argues, it is incumbent upon a wife to do something about that bad behaviour. In his book Lifelong Love, for instance, he talks about a wife throwing out her husband’s porn stash as an act of love. He, too, believes in boundaries, as his recent book When to Walk Away shows. And there are many more guests of yours that I could name (including myself) who have given the healthy message of how to confront a spouse doing something wrong.

You routinely feature guests who teach that the passive female behaviour advocated by Eggerichs isn’t just ineffective; it’s dangerous and can do harm. But then, incongruously, you also say that you stand behind Eggerichs’ core message.

By featuring guests like Vernick, Cloud, Townsend, Thomas, even myself, you prime your audience to think, “Focus on the Family is a safe place. They give advice which actually works.” But then you turn around and heavily promote Love & Respect, which teaches the opposite. Essentially, you’re doing a bait & switch.

You make people think that Focus on the Family is a safe resource by featuring healthy perspectives on your show, but then you market Love & Respect to those same listeners, or offer the book as an incentive for donations. You give your seal of approval to Love & Respect–a seal of approval that you earned through featuring teaching diametrically opposed to Love & Respect.

Examples of What You Are Affiliating with By Endorsing Love & Respect

By endorsing this book, you are implicitly endorsing all of the following views found in Love & Respect.

1. A man has desperate needs; a woman only has desires.

Please note that in the title itself, respect is something that a man “desperately needs”, while love is merely something she “most desires”. From the very start, Eggerichs is framing the man’s needs as being more important than the woman’s.

2. Sex is only for a husband’s physical release.

Love & Respect repeatedly says sex is for a husband’s physical release (p. 250). Eggerichs never gives in his book any other reason for sex–not intimacy; not growing the relationship; not feeling close. It is only about the husband having an orgasm.

3. Women’s sexual pleasure is so unimportant it’s not even worth mentioning.

In the book, he never once talks about how sex should feel good for the woman, too. In fact, he explicitly says that sex doesn’t take very long, so why wouldn’t she do it (p. 252–“Why would you deprive him of something that takes such a short amount of time and makes him sooooo happy!?”)? By endorsing this book, you are saying that you think it’s healthy to write a whole chapter in a marriage book about how a husband needs sex, but never once mention that a woman should feel pleasure as well, or that the husband has any obligation to ensure she does so. You think it’s okay to treat her sexuality as an afterthought, if that.

4. If a physically abusive husband “repents”, he should be allowed back in the house, and it’s now the wife’s job to not react to his anger.

You agree that it’s okay to frame a physically abusive spouse as only needing to “repent” to be let back into the home (p. 278), without a warning about the prevalence of the “love bombing” phenomenon–whereby a husband says all the right things to be allowed to return, but then becomes even more abusive afterwards. You agree that it’s safe and healthy to not warn women that true repentance must be accompanied by the fruits of repentance, and that these fruits must be demonstrated over a long period of time. And you agree that it’s wise counsel to then portray the problems in this relationship as resting on her shoulders, because she must now learn not to react to her abusive spouse’s anger, since to do so is disrespectful.

5. If a man is “drinking or straying”, he should be shown respect, rather than boundaries

You endorse the belief that the cure for any problem in a marriage is for the wife to respect her husband, no matter what he is doing. A man who is committing adultery or who is drinking heavily still needs to be respected (p. 88). And what does the word “respect” mean? On page 68, Eggerichs says that respect our husband in the way we respect a boss. He then elaborates using the CHAIRS acronym. So a wife to a husband who is drinking or straying must still treat him as her boss and presumably abide by all of the CHAIRS elements, including having sex with him; allowing him to make all the decisions; respecting his authority, and so on. You apparently have no problem with this advice being given to a woman married to an adulterous or alcoholic man.

6. If a woman is upset that a man leaves wet towels on the bed, it’s okay if the husband then denies the wife love–and it’s okay if he teaches his sons to ignore their mother’s correction, too.

In one of the worst anecdotes that my readers have repeatedly commented on, Emerson Eggerichs recounts how he leaves wet towels on the bed (among other things), and his wife Sarah would become upset about him for this (pages 242-243). She would ask her husband and her sons to stop doing this, but they did not listen. When she returned after being away for a week, Eggerichs told her that he didn’t miss her, and that he and the boys enjoyed being without her. Thus, by his own definition, he denied her love because she was asking him to not leave wet towels on the bed.

Let’s note, please, that it takes no more effort to put a wet towel on the floor (and only marginally more to hang it up) than to put it on the bed. By putting it on the bed, he is making more work for his wife, who will have to rescue that towel before it necessitates all the bedding being changed or causes the comforter/bedspread to grow mildewy over time. The immaturity in this anecdote is quite astounding, especially as he used it to illustrate how it was Sarah who was being disrespectful, completely ignoring the disrespectful way he was treating her, not least by standing with the boys against their mother. Demanding your wife respect you should not give a man permission to act like a petulant child, or to undermine the authority a mother has over her sons.

The resolution to this issue was that Emerson could continue to leave wet towels on the bed, and Sarah stopped asking him not to.

By endorsing this book, you are comfortable blaming a wife if she does not cater to her husband’s immaturity and selfishness.

7. Women are more easily deceived, and thus should not listen to their intuition, or the still, small voice in them.

Women can’t trust the messages they hear or believe, because they are so easily deceived (p. 230). Thus, they should trust the husband’s intuition, and not their own. When a woman believes something, she should disregard her opinion in favour of her husband’s perspective, in direct violation of 1 Timothy 2:5; Matthew 6:33; Acts 5:29; the events in Acts 5:1-11; and the events in 1 Samuel 25. It should be noted, as well, that Emerson Eggerichs makes this point by distorting Scripture. He says that Eve was deceived and then took the fruit to Adam (p. 230); Scripture, on the other hand, says that Adam was standing right there with her (Genesis 3:6).

You feel that this description of women is fair and correct, and do not take issue with the misuse of Scripture to support it.

8. A husband can criticize what he does not like about his wife, such as her weight gain, but she must not bring up what she doesn’t like about him–even if her concerns involve sin issues like porn use.

In chapter 19, Eggerichs gives this example of a wife being disrespectful: