Best-selling author and former pastor of New York City’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church, Tim Keller, took some heat last week after the chapter “Sex and Marriage” in his book “The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God” was accused of being harmful to women.
In a Twitter thread posted by Bryana Joy, the writer, poet, and full-time artist was discussing what she called the “grim link between pornography and Christian marriage resources.”
“I’ve been posting a lot about how Christian sex advice does damage to women’s sexuality & self-concept,” Bryana said to start her 38-part thread. “Today I’ll talk about what these materials have in common with something Christians hate: porn.”
Bryana offered three assumptions she believes the two share. They are as follows: “Women exist for men. Women exist for sex. Men are dominant and women are submissive.” Bryana concluded that “porn and evangelical Christianity are two sides of the same patriarchal coin.”
While she mentions books by Debi Pearl, John and Stasi Eldredge, Gary Thomas, Kevin Leman, and Douglas Wilson, Bryana said a passage from Tim Keller’s “The Meaning for Marriage” was particularly damaging to her.
In Parts 31 and 32 of the thread, Bryana mentioned that “in porn, pain is depicted as a regular sexual experience for women, & the lines between pain & pleasure are catastrophically blurred. Unfortunately, Christian sex & marriage resources sometimes contribute directly to this dangerous messaging, often due to lack of education.”
Bryana then stated that her goal isn’t to pick on Keller and explains that as far as she knows “he is a loving husband and a kind man,” before sharing that a passage in his book “The Meaning of Marriage” caused her damage.
“I shall never forget the damage that was done to me by a passage in ‘The Meaning of Marriage’ in which he casually writes about a repeated occurrence: asking his wife after sex ‘how was that?’ and her saying ‘it just hurt.’ [Although he is a loving husband] his lack of knowledge about women’s sexual pain contributed to my belief that for some women, pain is just ‘part of sex.’ This is false, and can have serious long-term medical consequences for women,” Bryana said.
Sheila Wray Gregoire, who is the author of “The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You’ve Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended” and founder of To Love, Honor and Vacuum, backed Bryana’s comments. “Of all the anecdotes from marriage books that we mentioned in The Great Sex Rescue, this passage from Tim Keller stuck with me the most. No commentary that sex actually shouldn’t hurt. It was so sad,” Gregoire wrote.
The thoughts and feelings Bryana, Gregorie, and others expressed invoked a response from Keller’s wife, Kathy. Mrs. Keller is someone who rarely posts on social media and was actually the one who wrote the part in the chapter Bryana referred to.
Kathy replied from her husband’s Twitter account saying, “While I normally avoid social media, I felt that I had to set the record straight, as so many wild assertions are being made about a quote from ‘The Meaning of Marriage.’ First, as anyone who reads the chapter headed ‘Sex and Marriage’ can see, the quote in question is from ME, not from Tim.”
Kathy then explained that she was referring to the earliest days of their marriage and that they had been virgins before their wedding day. “We were fumbling around and just learning the mechanics, not to mention the romance, of sex. My comment, which is indented so everyone knows it is a quote (is headed): As Kathy said in her notes: It refers to our performance anxiety (mostly Tim’s) and my discomfort (as a virgin on my honeymoon), and our willingness to abandon both of those things and just love one another.”
“[This quotation] has wrongly (and inexplicably) been attributed to Tim, which means you have robbed me of my voice, ladies,” Kathy continued. “At no time and in no way was there the least suggestion that women should accept painful intercourse as their lot. If that is what they are experiencing, they should see a doctor immediately!”
“In our case, my pain was very temporary and common among virginal brides,” Kathy concluded.
Bryana thanked Kathy for her clarification and reiterated that her comments weren’t “intended to be a personal attack” on the Kellers’ marriage. Rather, her issues were with the text of the book.
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Sharing a photo of the specific text from the book she was referring to, Bryana pointed out that “the text here doesn’t say anything about the painful sex being something that only happened during the honeymoon or the first months of marriage. Tim writes, ‘in those years, we started to dread having sex,’ and the ‘it just hurt’ line appears right after that. Hopefully you can understand how confusing this might be for a young bride (like myself). To me, the text seemed to suggest that over a long period of time you & Tim were engaging in sex in which you felt only pain and yet did not ask Tim to stop.”
Bryana shared with Kathy that she suffered from “severe vaginismus” as a young woman which made the words that she read in their book “absolutely devastating for the early months (even years) of my marriage—It made me think it was okay (even expected) for me to hide my pain from my husband during sex, and this made things so, SO much worse for us.”
“My husband & I read your book together in good faith just before our wedding, with no intent to criticize or find fault—and we did find much wisdom in it,” Bryana continued. “But sadly, the tangible and long-term damage this passage did to us was so great that we now regret reading it at all.”
Gregoire shared that her team did a study of 20,000 women and found that over 22 percent experienced vaginismus. Further, Gregoire said that if any of those women read the passage from Keller’s book, they’d probably interpret it the same way as Bryana did.
Bryana argued that while Kathy said the book doesn’t suggest a woman should accept painful intercourse, it could easily be misunderstood as such. “I hope you can understand how easy it would be to read the passage that way since there’s no caveat or warning given to couples that the anecdote (‘it just hurt’) is problematic,” Bryana said.
Commenting on Kathy’s response, Gregoire said, “Even if Kathy WASN’T enduring vaginismus; even if this was only temporary; even if this wasn’t a chronic problem–none of that was said in the book.”
Gregoire then pointed out that one of the problems with the way sex is portrayed in Keller’s book “is that it portrays not communicating during intercourse as normal. Kathy didn’t speak up, and Tim didn’t encourage her to. Nowhere was the solution given that they would start communicating.”
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During the time the Kellers wrote “The Meaning for Marriage,” vaginismus wasn’t necessarily something they would have thought of, since it is a condition that hasn’t been studied until recently. Bryana encouraged those who write marriage books to address the condition, which some of their readers will suffer from.
“I must admit,” Bryana said, “sometimes I am full of anger over the fact that generations of women have suffered what I suffered with NO support, NO acknowledgement in the medical community, and NO name for what they were experiencing. What happened to those women weighs on me every day. Many of them were abandoned by their partners (this STILL happens to women with vaginismus a lot) or forced themselves through years of agony in order to fulfill what church leaders told them was ‘their duty.’ It’s just so very unacceptable that we did this to women.”
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Gregoire agreed, saying, “I endured so much! The counsellors I saw at the time were more concerned with how Keith was coping than with how I was coping. It was devastating and compounded the pain. That’s one of the things that motivates our research!”
ChurchLeaders reached out to Bryana Joy and Sheila Wray Gregorie for comment and will update this article in the event of their reply.