Complementarian vs. Egalitarian Marriage: A Therapist’s Take

You and your spouse are arguing about something small. Whose family to visit at Christmas. Whether the kids do music or sports this year. How to spend the unexpected tax refund. The fight ends with one of you saying, "Fine, do it your way," and walking off. The decision is made. Nothing is actually settled. That is a power struggle. And in Christian marriages, power struggles often have an extra layer underneath the surface fight: an unresolved question about what kind of marriage you are supposed to be having in the first place. Three models compete for that answer. Complementarianism teaches that men and women hold equal value but different roles, with the husband holding final authority in decision-making. Egalitarianism teaches that men and women hold equal value and equal authority, making decisions jointly with no built-in hierarchy. A third model, authoritarianism, sits at one extreme: husbands hold unlimited say, wives are expected to submit without question. Most couples never sit down and discuss which model they hold to. They just discover, usually mid-conflict, that they hold different ones. A Note Before We Get Into It When we first published this article in February 2016, we leaned complementarian. The audio for this episode (OYF095) reflects that earlier view. We have since moved. After another decade of clinical work, after sitting with research from Sheila Wray Gregoire's team and others, and after watching how the models actually play out in our own marriage and in the marriages we work with, we have come to think egalitarianism is both the more biblically defensible model and the one most healthy Christian marriages already function as, whether they call themselves that or not. This article is the updated version. The audio is a historical artifact. We are not embarrassed by where we used to be on this; we wrote it in good faith with the best clinical and theological thinking we had at the time. We are also not interested in pretending we still hold a view we have moved on from. The Three Models of Christian Marriage The disagreement among Christian authors about how husbands and wives should relate has tended to organize itself around three models. Each one offers a different answer to the same question: when there is a decision to make and the two of you do not agree, who has the final say? View #1: Authoritarianism In an authoritarian marriage, the husband holds unlimited authority. The wife is expected to respond with unqualified submission. The husband has full say in all decisions, and the wife is not permitted to question his leadership in any situation.[i] What we see clinically in these marriages is that the wife, having no formal way to influence the marriage, ends up trying to regain influence through indirect means: withdrawal, guilt, weaponizing Scripture, leaving and coming back, or other patterns that signal distress without resolving it. The official structure says one thing. The actual relationship runs on something else. Some couples will say they are genuinely content with this model, and we want to represent that claim fairly. We are also clear that authoritarianism can look very close to coercive control, and the line between the two is uncomfortably thin. We will come back to that later. View #2: Complementarianism Complementarianism is the dominant evangelical position on marriage in North America. It affirms the full equality of men and women in essence and dignity, while holding that God has assigned different roles. Husbands are called to loving headship; wives are called to respectful submission. Decisions are made jointly in most cases, with the husband holding final authority in the rare situation of an impasse.[ii] The complementarian case rests on a particular reading of Ephesians 5:22-33, 1 Corinthians 11:3, and the creation order in Genesis 2. The strongest complementarian theologians, including Wayne Grudem and John Piper, have worked hard to distinguish the model from authoritarianism and from any reading that diminishes women. The case has theological seriousness and we want to represent it fairly. View #3: Egalitarianism Egalitarian marriage holds that men and women live as equals in value and in authority. Distinctions in gender are acknowledged where they exist, but they do not translate into a built-in hierarchy of decision-making. All decisions are made together. Headship language, where it appears in Scripture, is read through the broader pattern of mutual submission rather than as a unique authority assigned to husbands.[iii] The egalitarian case rests on Galatians 3:28 ("there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus"), the framing command of Ephesians 5:21 ("submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ") that introduces the entire household code, the Genesis 2 description of the woman as ezer kenegdo, often rendered as "a strength corresponding to him" rather than as a subordinate helper, and the consistent pattern of Jesus elevating women as full disciples and theological agents. Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE) offers a deeper egalitarian treatment for anyone who wants to go further than we can in an article. Belief Versus Practice: What Actually Happens One of the most useful pieces of research on this question came out of the 1996 Religious Identity and Influence Survey. Sociologist Melinda Lundquist Denton examined the relationship between religious identity, gender ideology, and how married couples actually make decisions.[iv] Her findings: Conservative Protestants profess a traditional gender role ideology where the husband leads, but the decision-making strategies they actually practice look very similar to those of more theologically liberal groups. Theologically liberal Protestants profess a more egalitarian ideology, but their actual decision-making is not significantly more egalitarian than conservative Protestants in practice. When conservative Protestant families described what "male headship" looked like in their actual lives, the most-cited element was not breadwinner status or final authority. It was the husband taking spiritual leadership. The plain reading of this data is that in many Christian families, professed ideology and lived practice do not line up. Couples meet somewhere in the middle of what works for them, regardless of the model they think they hold to. Sheila Wray Gregoire's research at Bare Marriage has extended this finding in important ways. Across large surveys of Christian women, her team has found that many couples who self-identify as complementarian operate as functional egalitarians. They make decisions together. They share roles based on capacity and preference rather than gender. They do not, in fact, default to husband-as-tiebreaker very often. The complementarian label is theological identity. The lived reality is mostly egalitarian.[v] This matters because it changes what we are actually arguing about. If most Christians who say they are complementarian are already living egalitarian, the question is not really whether egalitarianism works. The question is whether the complementarian label, even when held lightly, sets couples up to default toward hierarchy when they get into conflict and run out of better tools. What the Outcome Data Shows A 2010 study by Krista Lynn Minnotte and colleagues looked at gender ideology, work-to-family conflict, and marital satisfaction in dual-earner households.[vi] Two findings stand out: First, men's marital satisfaction was strongly affected by whether their gender ideology matched their wife's. Traditional men married to traditional women had above-average satisfaction. Egalitarian men married to egalitarian women had above-average satisfaction. Mismatched couples, regardless of which way the mismatch went, did worse. The model itself was less important than whether the couple agreed on it. Second, the picture for women was more complicated. Egalitarian wives often asked their husbands to do more housework, which generated short-term conflict. Traditional wives accepted disproportionate housework loads more readily, which reduced conflict but cost the wife. The deciding factor in women's marital satisfaction was less about ideology and more about what the husband actually did. Profession without practice was not enough. Gregoire's team has built on this with more recent data and reached a sharper conclusion. The pattern they have found, across multiple studies, is that complementarian marriages tend to show better outcomes when the couple acts egalitarian in practice. When complementarians actually live out the strict version of their model, with the husband as decision-maker and the wife in a posture of deference, the research associates the pattern with lower marital satisfaction, poorer outcomes for women's mental health, and a higher risk profile for emotional abuse.[vii] Of course it would. We are designed for relationships of mutuality. When a marriage runs on a structure where one person's voice carries inherently more weight, the person with less weight learns to suppress, accommodate, or quietly resent. None of those build a thriving partnership. Why We've Landed on Egalitarianism Three things moved us, and they have been working on us for years. The biblical case is stronger than we used to give it credit for. When Paul writes "submit to one another out of reverence for Christ" in Ephesians 5:21, he is framing the entire household code that follows. Read in context, the wife-husband instructions are a particular application of mutual submission, not a separate hierarchy embedded inside it. Galatians 3:28 collapses the distinctions of class, ethnicity, and gender for those in Christ. The Genesis 2 woman is named as a strength that corresponds to the man, not a junior partner. Jesus consistently received women as theological equals....