Bare Marriage

Bare Marriage

Tired of Christian pat answers about marriage? The podcast that goes in-depth into marriage, parenting, and even sex--to see how we can live the passionate life we were meant for. Paired with Bare Marriage--the blog!

Episodes

March 26, 2026 56 mins

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Keith and Rebecca are taking over the podcast this week and are answering your questions — from how to find a healthy church community to whether complementarianism is a dealbreaker. They're refreshingly honest and a little funny about it. Then Joanna joins to dig into a brand-new peer-reviewed paper on how internalized modesty messaging affects girls' self-esteem and their risk of being sexually harassed ...

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What does it mean to have realistic expectations of a spouse with ADHD? How does gender play into how ADHD impacts a relationship? And what do accommodations actually look like—versus what do they not look like in a healthy marriage?

This week Rebecca talks about her own diagnosis of ADHD with her father Keith (a pediatrician) and good friend Daniel Forsythe (a licensed psychotherapist who works with neurodiverse mar...

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What if the reason so many women struggle with desire, arousal, and orgasm has nothing to do with their bodies—and everything to do with what they were taught before they even wanted to be sexual? In this episode, Rebecca and I pull together research and real-life stories to trace a thread that runs from how we raise our daughters, to what happens on the wedding night, to why so many women are secretly faking it.

THA...

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Jay Stringer, licensed therapist and author of Unwanted, is back to talk about his brand new book Desire: The Longings Inside Us and the New Science of How We Love, Heal, and Grow. Together, we unpack why so many of us — especially those from church backgrounds — were taught to fear and suppress our desires rather than develop them. We dig into enmeshment, the "provisional self," why differentiation is actually...

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Anna Rollins grew up as the kind of girl who took her faith seriously — and that's exactly why it hurt her so much. In this conversation, Anna and I dig into her memoir Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl, where she traces how purity culture's messages about desire, self-denial, and the body quietly fueled decades of disordered eating, compulsive exercise, and sexual pain. What strikes me most...

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Rebecca, Joanna, and I are pulling back the curtain on what went into making the Love & Respect docuseries — including the things that didn't make the final cut.

From the bizarre Nazi torture illustration Emerson used to keep women in bad marriages, to the genuinely heartbreaking story of a little boy watching his father abuse his mother, this episode gets raw and honest about why we've been fighting this ba...

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Part two of a three-part docuseries deep dive into the best-selling evangelical marriage book Love & Respect.

LOVE & RESPECT DOCUSERIES:

This podcast delves into what Love & Respect is based on--recycled ideas from a 1970s best-seller; faulty stats; misrepresented research--and edi...

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Part one of a three-part docuseries deep dive into the best-selling evangelical marriage book, Love & Respect.

THE LOVE & RESPECT DOCUSERIES:

This is a video series, so if you want to watch it in all its glory, head over to https://youtu.be/z3EEAkjwcXA!

To see episodes 2 & 3 when they launch next week, subscribe to the Good Fruit Faith Channel

This podcast delves into the broken logic of Love & Resp...

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Today I'm talking with Dr. Steven Tracy, author of "To Heal or Harm," about how scripture has been twisted to keep abuse victims trapped. We're diving into passages that discuss things like, "wives submit," "God hates divorce," and "a gentle answer turns away wrath" to show what they actually mean in context. And spoiler alert: none of them tell victims to stay in abuse. ...

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We're tackling three really problematic things that have happened recently with evangelical leaders that show just how low the bar has gotten for men. From Jonathan Podluka announcing he wants to sleep with multiple beautiful women, to pastors responding to Philip Yancey's affair by saying "it could be any of us," to Tim Challies telling people in miserable marriages to just stick it out until they di...

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Today I'm talking with Lydia Grace about her incredible new book, Bible Truth About Women. Lydia grew up in the ultra-conservative IBLP circles and went to seminary to answer her own questions about what the Bible really says about women's roles. What she discovered was shocking: there are ore than 120 misleading tactics that complementarians use to prop up male authority that simply isn't in the original ...

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We're kicking off 2026 by teaching you how to think critically about Christian marriage and relationship advice! Rebecca and I walk through some really problematic articles and social media posts - from the Gospel Coalition's piece against therapy to Tilly Dillehay’s tandem bike marriage metaphor - and show you exactly why they make us feel unsafe. We'll teach you how to spot red flags, question who benefi...

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We're coming full circle from our podcast on right-wing authoritarianism to talk about that viral Oklahoma student essay and why Christians rallying around bad arguments makes all Christians look terrible. Then Keith and I get vulnerable about how our faith has changed over the last few years—from realizing faith isn't just about beliefs, to understanding who Jesus actually called out (spoiler: not "the wo...

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Keith and I went through 10 clips from evangelical influencers and pastors that have been driving people crazy all year. We break down why Josh Howerton's claims about conservative mental health don't hold up, why blaming women for divorce is absurd, and how complementarian teaching about male authority actually contradicts what Jesus taught.

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It's episode 307 of the Bare Marriage podcast! Holly Fletcher joins us to talk about her AMAZING new book Missionary Kids. I devoured it in one sitting. We need to listen to the stories of these kids, because they're a microcosm of white evangelicalism!

JOIN OUR FUNDRAISING CAMPAIGN!

Help us raise money to fund our research, our new podcast docuseries, and our translation projects! Give through the Good Fruit Fai...

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Happy American Thanksgiving! We're rerunning one of my favorite episodes from four years ago where Rebecca and I talk about what God is actually like—spoiler: He laughs and takes joy in life, not just suffers on the cross. We also dive into why our Great Sex Rescue research matters and address all those critiques about our methodology (and yes, we're now peer-reviewed, so that critique doesn't really work ...

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Complementarians use a lot of really nice-sounding words to describe their beliefs about gender roles, but when you actually break down what they mean, they're not talking about roles at all—they're talking about hierarchy. In this episode, Keith and I decode all the euphemisms like "different roles," "servant leadership," and "his headship is for your protection" to show what comp...

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We're diving into part two of our discussion on Francine Rivers' "And the Shofar Blew.” While Christian fiction can be inspirational, this novel reinforces dangerous theology about marriage, telling abuse victims to stay and suffer "better," portraying women who report pastoral abuse as liars, and presenting an incredibly sexist view of women's roles in the church as normal and godly. Join m...

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We're doing something we've never done before—looking at a Christian fiction book to explore how fiction shapes our theology of marriage. Today we're discussing Francine Rivers' "And the Shofar Blew.” We're talking about how fiction doesn't give explicit advice but still profoundly influences our worldview about faith and marriage, and how even books with problematic messages can become...

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Ever been told you're complaining too much about how women are treated because "things are so much better now"? Yeah, me too. In this episode, I sit down with journalist and author Dorothy Greco to talk about her new book For the Love of Women, and we dig into why sexism is absolutely still alive and well—and how it's affecting all of us in ways we might not even realize. This conversation is going to...

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