Am I My Husband’s Keeper?

I’ve heard a lot of conversation in the last few years around the idea of purity culture and the damage it caused to so many. When I first heard this term, I wasn’t sure exactly what it meant. Purity, after all, is a good thing. As followers of Jesus, we want to live with pure hearts, minds, and actions. So what about purity culture made it so harmful?

As I kept reading, I discovered not only what purity culture was but also how deeply it had impacted me. I graduated from high school in 2000, right at the height of purity culture in the evangelical world, though no one I knew was calling it that back then. And as I unraveled the core teachings of purity culture and why they were damaging, I landed on a few key principles that informed the whole thing.

One of these key damaging principles, the one that most deeply influenced me, wasn’t purity—but the idea that women are responsible to keep men pure. That a wife is responsible to manage her husband’s struggles (in sexual purity as well as in other areas) through submission and self-sacrifice.

So, for example, if your husband is looking at porn, you need to help him overcome his addiction by having more sex with him. Of course, those who understand the nature of addiction know this strategy won’t work. A man addicted to porn does not need more sex. He needs therapy and inner healing; he needs to learn how to become an emotionally healthy person. He might even need deliverance. This advice also completely ignores the needs of the wife and how violating such a proposition is to her spirit, soul, and body.

And if your husband is lazy or disrespectful or angry, you need to encourage him and show him more respect. You should not confront him or ask for repentance and meaningful change, but instead you need to treat him like a king in hopes that will inspire him to live like one. Instead of asking husbands to live in a way that earns their respect, wives must give unconditional respect even in the face of very unhealthy and ungodly behavior. Yet, I never heard people asking how this might impact the wife and why it was her responsibility.  

This also meant that if a man lusts after a woman, the woman is responsible because she somehow invited it through her clothing or actions. As Christians we are called to understand and care about how our choices impact others. Paul urged believers to live with care toward less mature brothers and sisters so as not to make it easier for them to sin (see Rom. 14; 1 Cor. 10:23–33). Yet, the choice to sin is always the responsibility of the one who sins. No matter how a woman dresses, a man can and should choose to think and act with purity toward her.

However, in the world of purity culture, men can’t help themselves, so women are responsible for the sins of men. 

Looking back all these years later, I am baffled by this line of reasoning. Who decided men got a free pass on their behavior because it was their wives’ job to fix them? And why did we think this made sense in the context of a gospel that teaches personal responsibility and repentance, a gospel that teaches that only Jesus can free us from our sins.

Ultimately, this teaching about a woman’s responsibility to keep men pure through the way she dresses and through adequately performing her wifely duties, coupled with her submission to her husband’s role as her leader and head, put her in a situation of no power but all the blame.

And no one deserves that.

The Bible does teach us to love one another sacrificially, but that doesn’t mean embracing codependency in our marriages. Healthy sacrificial love choses to serve in order to care for and lift up another person. In marriage, it looks like preferring the other person and being willing to go out of my way to be helpful or considerate. But here’s the key—healthy sacrificial living goes both ways. I sacrifice for him, and he sacrifices for me.

That’s a very different picture than the one I’d learned in the marriage books. It took me too many years to realize that the marriage ideals taught in so many Christian circles actually lead to codependency.

Codependency is an imbalance in a relationship in which one person enables the other person’s self-destructive behavior, like addiction, poor mental health, immaturity, irresponsibility, or under-achievement. It typically includes high self-sacrifice, a focus on others’ needs, suppression of one’s own emotions, and attempts to control or fix other people’s problems.

Not only is this an unhealthy way to relate to others, it’s also not God’s heart for us. Sacrificial love doesn’t mean enabling another person’s issues and insecurities. Sacrificial love doesn’t mean working harder on your husband’s problems than he’s willing to work on them himself.

God’s ideal for marriage is mutual submission—both husband and wife giving and sacrificing for the other (see Eph. 5:21–33; 1 Cor. 7:5). Wives are responsible to love and serve their husbands wholeheartedly, just like husbands are responsible to love and serve their wives. Neither spouse can save the other; only Jesus can do that.

To purchase my book, The Way Back to Hope, CLICK HERE!

Receive a FREE downloadable study guide for The Way Back to Hope.