One of the worst places to receive dating advice is often the church, but this also applies to Christian content creators as well. Often, they tend to have more charismatic theological backgrounds, or if they try to speak to men, they do so with a very milquetoast presentation. The gender slop is often good for business, as the dating discourse is unending and the ridiculous behaviors of women are often rationalized by other women or unaddressed by the church. Effective Purpose, hosted by Matt Wilson, was one of several YouTubers that we previously labeled in this camp. In fact, we wrote the following of him:
Effective Purpose is very much “pop-psychology” and is theologically adjacent to John Mark Comer, which is neither masculine nor traditional. He also rationalizes bad behavior in women under the guise of hypergamy or other “biological instincts.”
His channel has 30.2K subscribers, and his content centers around modern dating culture. Increasingly, his content has been very manosphere-adjacent, more directly addressing the grievances of men and the church’s coddling of women. He has critiqued the “white knights” and those who “enable” women—often without devolving into slop. For several months, he has been going on the “reviling wife” talking point, even having interviewed David Edgington.
Recently, he interviewed a guest named Jordan, who gives an account of how he married a reviling wife who, after seven years of counseling, endured constant blame from the church on account of his wife’s misbehavior. This ultimately ended in divorce, wherein he tells his story.
Jordan’s marriage began during a mission trip to Ecuador. He falls in love, and they get married. It is while they were on their honeymoon that she becomes unnecessarily irate at him for a kitchen mess while he was cooking her dinner, spoiling the “honeymoon phase” of their marriage. Nothing is said about whether this was a “green-card” marriage. There are many tales of similar “transformations” happening after the marriage of foreign women when being granted legal status in America. This is a major risk associated with the “passport bro” movement. The fact that her mother was also heavily involved in their marriage was also contributory to the problems experienced later on.
The marital struggles early on led them to seek counseling at the local PCA church. The wife, Daniela, became increasingly dissatisfied with Jordan’s work ethic despite the fact that he was working several jobs to the point where he was hospitalized in his efforts to provide for her. He also recounts her spending habit which the example provided was an email mentioning her purchase of Invisalign dental care. Daniela became increasingly verbally and physically abusive towards Jordan.
For seven years, the couple sought counseling at Crossroads PCA in Fishers, Indiana, where Jordan was constantly chastised for his unproven sin of alcoholism and otherwise blamed for his wife’s misbehavior. She would even report to the police that he fed their two daughters alcohol, of which the police found no evidence. Screenshots of the police reports are provided. Jordan also recorded interactions with his wife confessing to having hit him and his interactions with the pastors during counseling. The claim of alcoholism was not even driven by his wife so much as the church because he so happened to drink on occasion. His wife would also file a protective order before subsequently retracting it. Jordan describes the impact of false claims upon his reputation within the church, where even though the accusations of child abuse were false, he still wore a “scarlet letter” when people at the church knew about it.
Wilson speaks to the pastors blaming both Jordan and Daniela equally for the marital problems, calling this the “Equality Fallacy.” By dividing the blame equally, this tacitly blames the man for the entirety of the problem. He describes this as a common “white knight” approach.
On two occasions, per Jordan, the counselors attempted to rebuke the woman for her behavior, resulting in the wife scolding the pastor and crying profusely. This was a different pastor than before, and he gave up on the counseling thereafter.
In 2020, Daniela abandoned Jordan with both children and forced him to file a separation agreement to see his kids, which, in part due to his longing, was unfavorable towards him. This endured for two years, to his financial hardship, until he filed for divorce. Wilson then uses this to discuss the pitfalls of “complementarian” theology in which they preach male headship in theory but not in practice. Wilson speaks to this as disaffecting men from the church.
Towards the end, Wilson delivers a verdict of the situation where he describes using an email that Daniela wrote to conclude that she was lashing out because she was unattracted to Jordan and thought she could “do better than him.” In the email, she labeled him as boring and had also, during the marriage, accused him of being gay. This leads her to attack him until he snaps and gives her impetus to leave him with a free conscience. Wilson concludes by stating that men are losing trust in women and in churches that enable them. The comment section has similar stories being shared.
Analysis
Edgington’s concept of the reviling wife is catching on, and the problem presented was not in a mainline or charismatic denomination but in the supposedly conservative PCA churches, which demonstrates how ubiquitous the enablement of female misbehavior is within American Christianity. There is a tendency to blame the man for any and every problem in a marriage, that a wife’s dissatisfaction or misbehavior is her husband’s failure to lead. This functionally absolves women of their sin. Simply stated: no, a man is not responsible for everything that happens in a marriage.
Left unmentioned was speculation about whether Daniela was an “alpha widow,” a term which denotes that Jordan failed to live up to a previous sexual partner. The other speculation that she married him for the green card was also undiscussed. Otherwise, Wilson’s analysis was very poignant without impeding the flow of the video.
Overall, for Matt Wilson at Effective Purpose, videos like this are evidence that his content is vastly improved, and hopefully, he provides more stories of cases like Jordan’s in the future.
