Episode Details

You and your spouse are arguing about something small. Whose family to visit at Christmas. Whether the kids do music or sports this year. How to spend the unexpected tax refund. The fight ends with one of you saying, "Fine, do it your way," and walking off. The decision is made. Nothing is actually settled. That is a power struggle. And in Christian marriages, power struggles often have an extra layer underneath the surface fight: an unresolved question about what kind of marriage you are supposed to be having in the first place. Three models compete for that answer. Complementarianism teaches that men and women hold equal value but different roles, with the husband holding final authority in decision-making. Egalitarianism teaches that men and women hold equal value and equal authority, making decisions jointly with no built-in hierarchy. A third model, authoritarianism, sits at one extreme: husbands hold unlimited say, wives are expected to submit without question. Most couples never sit down and discuss which model they hold to. They just discover, usually mid-conflict, that they hold different ones. A Note Before We Get Into It When we first published this article in February 2016, we leaned complementarian. The audio for this episode (OYF095) reflects that earlier view. We have since moved. After another decade of clinical work, after sitting with research from Sheila Wray Gregoire's team and others, and after watching how the models actually play out in our own marriage and in the marriages we work with, we have come to think egalitarianism is both the more biblically defensible model and the one most healthy Christian marriages already function as, whether they call themselves that or not. This article is the updated version. The audio is a historical artifact. We are not embarrassed by where we used to be on this; we wrote it in good faith with the best clinical and theological thinking we had at the time. We are also not interested in pretending we still hold a view we have moved on from. The Three Models of Christian Marriage The disagreement among Christian authors about how husbands and wives should relate has tended to organize itself around three models. Each one offers a different answer to the same question: when there is a decision to make and the two of you do not agree, who has the final say? View #1: Authoritarianism In an authoritarian marriage, the husband holds unlimited authority. The wife is expected to respond with unqualified submission. The husband has full say in all decisions, and the wife is not permitted to question his leadership in any situation.[i] What we see clinically in these marriages is that the wife, having no formal way to influence the marriage, ends up trying to regain influence through indirect means: withdrawal, guilt, weaponizing Scripture, leaving and coming back, or other patterns that signal distress without resolving it. The official structure says one thing. The actual relationship runs on something else. Some couples will say they are genuinely content with this model, and we want to represent that claim fairly. We are also clear that authoritarianism can look very close to coercive control, and the line between the two is uncomfortably thin. We will come back to that later. View #2: Complementarianism Complementarianism is the dominant evangelical position on marriage in North America. It affirms the full equality of men and women in essence and dignity, while holding that God has assigned different roles. Husbands are called to loving headship; wives are called to respectful submission. Decisions are made jointly in most cases, with the husband holding final authority in the rare situation of an impasse.[ii] The complementarian case rests on a particular reading of Ephesians 5:22-33, 1 Corinthians 11:3, and the creation order in Genesis 2. The strongest complementarian theologians, including Wayne Grudem and John Piper, have worked hard to distinguish the model from