Evangelicals and Sex

It's NOT good news

Last month, Southern Baptist megachurch celebrity pastor Josh Howerton stood on stage in a jean jacket and delivered a sermon that included these words of advice to women:

“When you get to his wedding night…stand where he tells you to stand, wear what he tells you to wear, and do what he tells you to do.”

The congregation laughed and applauded.

But when Sheila Gregoire posted the video on X (formerly known as Twitter), hundreds of people denounced Howerton’s message and expressed disgust with such an objectifying and misogynistic view of sex, marriage, male entitlement, and women’s submission.

On the one hand, I felt so grateful for all the people who saw the problem and called it out. That was encouraging.

On the other hand, I was saddened by an influential heavy-hitter—a much-loved evangelical with a million followers—who instead of standing in solidarity with those protesting Howerton’s harmful teachings, minimized his remarks as merely “stupid stuff” and suggested that those denouncing his message were “piling on.” It was a pattern we’ve seen again and again in evangelicalism—the powerful sticking up for the powerful, while the powerless are incessantly silenced. (In fairness, an apology was later made in reply to a single individual, but of course it received a miniscule percentage of the attention garnered by the original post. The damage was done.)  

Howerton himself doubled down and criticized the criticizers. It was “a joke,” he insisted.

Many others in evangelicalism jumped on board with the “it was a joke” defense, often tossing in the trope that the women, who were objecting to being objectified, were just “too sensitive.”

But as Gregoire pointed out, what Howerton effectively did was to normalize “a pornified view of women and sex from the pulpit.” And that’s not a joking matter; it’s actively promoting a dynamic of harm that impacts real people.

Of course, it’s not just Howerton. His message is part of a much bigger problem in evangelicalism, as Rick Pidcock was quick to explain. Howerton’s message was demonstrative of “how authoritarian pastors wield modern worship and aesthetics as the drugs to help their misogyny go down.”

This kind of dehumanizing indoctrination has been going on for decades, in sermon after sermon after sermon and in book after book after book.

“The reason conservatives have let male sexual entitlement go on for generations without being addressed,” says Pidcock, “is that it is merely one expression of their larger context of sacralized male authority and female submission.”

Then, another video resurfaced. It was one that Josh Howerton and his wife, Jana Howerton, had put out, apparently purporting to give marital advice. It wasn’t a good look… and that’s wholly apart from the fact that it wasn’t clear they had any expertise at all to even be giving such advice.

In the video, as Jana Howerton sits side by side with Josh, she tells of how “the Holy Spirit convicted” her to have more sex with her husband and of how she had to “walk in repentance” for “being selfish” and “being tired” sometimes. Josh corrected her to say that it was “GLAD repentance,” and then he ended things with a laughing reminiscence of a high school football cheer from his adolescence: “Be Aggressive.” It was a final touch that only served to solidify an image of an immature, underdeveloped boy.

To say the video was cringey would be an understatement.

But more than that, it made me so sad to see, reflected in their own marriage, the very embodiment of what Howerton had preached: “Do what he tells you to do.”

Countless women and girls are being harmed by this kind of misogynistic teaching that is rampant within evangelicalism. It does no good for men and boys either. And it’s not just pastors saying “stupid stuff;” it’s pastors preaching harmful stuff as though it were the good and biblical way.

Theology has consequences, and those consequences can be extremely deleterious for human flourishing and for healthy marriages.

For more on all this, check out Sheila Gregoire’s “Bare Marriage” podcast on “Why Evangelical Honeymoons Often Go So Badly.”