DALROCK: The wake-up call.

Because submission to a failing husband is something we find difficult to accept, modern Christians have substituted the exact opposite in its place. . . .

In the new narrative (the one which replaces Scripture), what is required to fix the husband is for the wife not to submit but to give him a wake-up call. Joel and Kathy Davisson are the most overt with this message, going so far as to directly advocate that the wife first threaten and then if needed carry through with divorce to lower the boom on the unresponsive husband. However, the much more common narrative is more subtle. Whatever sinful action the wife takes to give her husband the wake-up call typically isn’t overtly sanctioned, but it is consistently presented as the required catalyst to change both the man and the marriage. Because of this, we end up with a celebration of the outcome of the wife’s sin while either ignoring, minimizing, or paying lip service to the sin itself.

From the comments: “The problem with all of these scenarios is that the wife’s best interests are still these male pastor’s and counselor’s priority. So insaturated has the feminine imperative become for the modern church that even the men, calling other ‘failing’ men to Man-Up and do what she says, have no other mental model to work from. There literally is no other concept than feminine-primacy for them to consider.”