Pastor Josh Howerton's advice to new brides was to "do what he tells you to do" in the bedroom

An evangelical pastor is getting some well-deserved criticism after telling a hypothetical new bride to “do what he tells you to do” on your wedding night.

Pastor Josh Howerton, who leads Lakepointe Church, a megachurch in Rockwall, Texas, delivered the message on February 24. About two minutes into his sermon, he was talking about how the church had just sponsored a “Marriage Night” event. People who couldn’t go were asking him what was discussed there, so he gave them a glimpse of what they missed by offering a “gold nugget of advice” to everyone in the congregation who is on the path toward marriage.

Here’s the entire segment in context:

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That clip went viral after Christian writer Sheila Wray Gregoire posted the second half of it last week. (She was familiar with Howerton already because of his alleged plagiarism.) In a thread, she explained, “Marital rape is not funny. Normalizing sexual coercion is not funny. Not caring at all about female pleasure is not funny.”

Gregoire got a lot of criticism for only posting the punchline but not the setup, including from Josh Howerton himself:

… The person who originally posted this took an old preacher joke about marriage, edited out the comment immediately before aimed at men, and then very conveniently ended the clip before it's made clear it's part of a joke.

They then deceitfully presented it as my “advice to women” where if all you saw was the quote or the clip they selectively edited, you don’t know it was half of a joke, not “advice.”

Gregoire later posted the full clip, but obviously, the full context doesn’t make this situation any better. We already knew it was meant to be a joke. The problem is that the joke isn’t funny and it has a really despicable underlying message.

Instead of talking about Heaven and Hell, Howerton’s congregation would be far better served if he spoke about why so many white evangelical women feel trapped in a misogynistic church culture that teaches them to be submissive while always putting their husband’s needs above their own. But pastors like him don’t have the courage to do that.

Or maybe they just don’t have the capacity to understand why their comments are so off-putting, which is why they keep repeating these mistakes.

April Ajoy, a progressive Christian who has criticized church culture, told Baptist News Global why she found his “joke” so disturbing:

“That rhetoric leads women to view sex in marriage as a duty, not something to enjoy. While his words were more overt, it’s not niche.”

Ajoy remembers: “I was taught that it’s the wife’s job to please her husband even when she’s not in the mood. I remember being a young girl at women’s church events where the leaders would talk about the importance of wives putting out and how sex is something men need and if that need wasn’t met, husbands could look elsewhere. I was never once taught about female pleasure. It took me years into my own marriage and lots of therapy before I stopped objectifying myself and could actually enjoy intimacy in marriage.”

She gets right to the heart of it.

The problem isn’t that Howerton told a bad joke. It’s that Howerton created an environment in which statements like that get laughs.

It’s easy to connect the dots between a congregation that finds gender-role humor hilarious and a congregation that looks the other way when it comes to sexual abuse.

The question now is whether Howerton cares enough about the women in his community to stand with them or whether he’ll keep doubling down on Christian sexism. So far, all he’s done is make things worse. As one former church member put it online, “I am thanking God for prompting us to leave prior to this sermon so my two teenage daughters were not exposed to this spiritual abuse.”