I Took My Wife Off Social Media

On September 23, Right Wing Watch published a clip of Brian Sauvé taken from a King’s Hall Podcast episode on Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother charged with killing her three children in 2023, whose first trial ended in a mistrial this September. In the clip Brian argued that husbands and fathers should oversee how their wives and daughters use social media. The episode had drawn on Jonathan Haidt’s argument that heavy social media use poses particular dangers to adolescent girls, including the spread of anxiety and depression among them. A comedian the hosts identify as Josh Benson told the two men to move to the Middle East. Brian reported that women answered with t-shirts reading “unsupervised woman,” and that one woman commented that she would like to castrate a man. He also read a warning attributed to Pastor Tom Buck against following the Ogden group and anyone who promotes it, given “with the same energy I would have when I warn against false teachers.” Brian Sauvé and Eric Conn answered all of it in “Unsupervised Women: How Social Media Stirs Mental Illness,” released October 9.

I support Brian Sauvé and Eric Conn and the work they are doing, and I want no reader to mistake where I stand. I also expect them to say things that are wrong. Every man who teaches in public says things that need correcting, and James includes himself when he says so.

“For we all stumble in many ways. If anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able to bridle the entire body as well” (James 3:2 LSB).

The church must decide what to do with men like these. Many Christians have answered by forming camps.

Brothers and camps

When the Corinthians sorted themselves by teacher, Paul treated the sorting itself as the evidence of their immaturity.

“For when one says, ‘I am of Paul,’ and another, ‘I am of Apollos,’ are you not mere men?” (1 Corinthians 3:4 LSB).

The camp decides what it thinks of a sentence by asking who said it. Eric raised this in the episode, and Brian answered with a case against himself. Had James White made the same argument about social media and the duty of husbands, Brian said, some of their own listeners would have found a reason to be angry at him, and many of the people now denouncing Brian would have praised it as a word the church needs. He called it a temptation for every man, himself and Eric included. That honesty is rare in a fight like this one, and it is the right answer to it. A man has to ask whether he rejects a claim because it is false or because of the camp it came from.

When a brother errs in public, Scripture gives the pattern for correcting him. Paul says of Peter, “I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned” (Galatians 2:11 LSB), and Peter later commends “our beloved brother Paul” to the churches (2 Peter 3:15). Public correction left the brotherhood intact.

The two hosts practice habits that camps rarely keep. Brian told the wives who listen to the show that if their husbands forbid them to listen to The King’s Hall, they should obey their husbands. He said that when the show draws a hostile crowd, he has tried almost every time to make sure that crowd hears the call to repent of sin and trust Christ. Eric spoke with respect of pastors who disagree with them and refuse to lie about them. Those habits commend them, and the church is poorer when it trades men like that for the comfort of its own camp.

Correction belongs in this entry too, and I would rather give it as a friend than leave it for their enemies to use. Twice in the episode the hosts made women’s race and bodies the joke. Brian joked about Eric’s reaction videos to “very large black women,” and Eric joined in. At the close, Eric promoted a video asking whether demons of gluttony can be cast out of “fat black women,” added “She’s so fat,” and Brian called it “really funny” and told listeners to follow him. Gluttony is a sin Scripture names, and a man may rebuke it in someone proven guilty of it. A woman’s weight does not prove that guilt, and her race has nothing to do with it. Every mocking passage in Scripture aims at idols, false prophets, or the claims of false teachers (1 Kings 18:27; Isaiah 44:9-20; Galatians 5:12), and none aims at a person’s ethnicity or body. Paul forbids that speech to every Christian.

“nor filthiness and foolish talk, or coarse jesting, which are not fitting, but rather giving of thanks” (Ephesians 5:4 LSB).

James says the tongue that blesses God also curses “men, who have been made in the likeness of God” (James 3:9 LSB), and he concludes that these things ought not to be so. Paul tells Titus why this matters most for men who teach.

“in all things show yourself to be a model of good works, with purity in doctrine, dignified, sound in word which is irreproachable, so that the opponent will be put to shame, having nothing bad to say about us” (Titus 2:7-8 LSB).

The opponent searching for something bad to say about these men finds it in their jokes. I say this as a brother who stands with them, and I hope they hear it that way.

What they said is true

The clip ranged wider than social media, into women’s unsupervised access to one another, voting, and political rule, and Right Wing Watch reported it that way. I hold with Brian on those points as well, and my view should surprise no one who has read me. Writing this entry, I realized that I have stated that position and commented on it in public without ever writing on it thoroughly. Voting and women’s place in public life will get their own entry, with the texts laid out. This entry takes up a husband’s duty to guard his wife’s company, on a screen and in person. The charge against Brian is that a husband who oversees his wife’s social media is a tyrant. Paul sets the husband’s headship beside Christ’s.

“But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything” (Ephesians 5:24 LSB).

Brian pointed out that Paul states the principle here with no exception clause. Paul knew a wife must refuse a command to sin, and he teaches that truth elsewhere. Brian suspects that Paul gave the rule without the exception because he knew how readily we run to the exceptions, and I think he is right. In the next sentence Paul tells husbands what their headship is for.

“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she would be holy and blameless. So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church” (Ephesians 5:25-29 LSB).

Christ’s love for His bride has an aim. He washes her with the word so that she will be holy. A husband who loves his wife in that pattern cares what is shaping her mind every day, including what reaches her through the phone in her hand. The law gave a husband authority over the binding commitments his wife made in his house: “Every vow and every binding oath to humble herself, her husband may cause it to stand, or her husband may annul it” (Numbers 30:13 LSB). The law’s case is vows, and its principle reaches further. God assumed a husband would know what was binding his wife and would answer for it. A husband who never knows what is shaping his wife cannot exercise the authority that law assumed.

The first marriage shows a husband who received the command and joined the transgression.

“Then the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, so she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate” (Genesis 3:6 LSB).

Eric recounted that a few pastors answered the controversy by saying that a man who marries a godly woman will not need to supervise her. He and Brian took that line back to Eden. Eve was sinless when the serpent came to her, and her husband was with her. Some read “with her” as placing Adam beside her only when she handed him the fruit. Even on that reading God’s sentence names what Adam did: “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife” (Genesis 3:17 LSB). God had given the command to Adam (Genesis 2:16-17), and Adam took his direction from his wife in the very matter God had put in his charge. A wife’s godliness never made her husband’s watch unnecessary.

Paul warns that younger widows “learn to be idle, as they go around from house to house. And not merely idle, but also gossips and busybodies, talking about things not proper to mention” (1 Timothy 5:13 LSB). That is talk carried in person, from door to door, and social media carries the same talk into every home at every hour. A husband answers for the company his wife keeps, whether it reaches her through a screen, a neighbor’s door, or the pews of a church. Paul also warns of the men who corrupt women by entering their homes.

“holding to a form of godliness, but having denied its power. Keep away from such men as these. For among them are those who enter into households and take captive weak women weighed down with sins, being led on by various desires, always learning and never able to come to the full knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:5-7 LSB).

A phone enters every household, and Paul’s remedy for the men who enter households is distance: keep away from them.

God has not left women undiscipled. He commands older women to teach the younger.

“Older women likewise are to be reverent in their behavior, not malicious gossips nor enslaved to much wine, teaching what is good, so that they may instruct the young women in sensibility: to love their husbands, to love their children, to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands, so that the word of God will not be slandered” (Titus 2:3-5 LSB).

Titus 2 also shows the aim of a husband’s oversight. God commands women to keep company with women, and the oversight exists so that the company is good, with older women teaching what is good. Women will be discipled by women, so the question a husband must ask is which women are discipling his wife. Brian described women online who rallied to a mother charged with killing her children and blamed her husband instead. Reporting from her trial confirms both the supporters in pink outside the courthouse and the unsupported accusations against her husband. Women who spread false accusations against the father of those children are teaching younger women to be malicious gossips, the first thing Paul forbids the older women. A husband who guards his wife against that teaching is doing what love requires. How he guards her is his judgment, made under the Word and answerable to it. The shirt reading “unsupervised woman” boasts of being under no one’s oversight, and Titus 2 calls a young wife to be subject to her own husband. Brian observed that a year ago many of the women wearing it would have taken it for a feminist slogan.

The company I let my household keep

“Do not be deceived: ‘Bad company corrupts good morals’” (1 Corinthians 15:33 LSB).

That verse convicts me before it convicts anyone else.

Other believers counseled me to find the best church I could, and I followed their counsel. I took my family into Auke Bay Bible Church in Juneau, a congregation I would not have chosen on my own conviction. I tried to work with them. I never formally joined, because we ran into too many conflicts. When I appealed to the elders from Scripture with the texts open, they refused correction, and I have written about that publicly. I kept my family among professing believers who opposed Christ. God warns against that company, and my conscience warned me too. I placed my household in it anyway, and their company harmed my home. The people who can harm a wife through a screen can harm her across a table, and a professing church gives them no less access. I made that decision, and I own it.

I made it because I was trying not to be dogmatic. I did not want to be the man who always insists he is right, so I set my conscience aside and deferred to the counsel of others. Scripture does honor counsel: “in abundance of counselors there is salvation” (Proverbs 11:14 LSB). Counsel informs a conscience, and a man still answers to God for obeying what his conscience has learned from the Word. Paul writes about disputed matters of food and days (Romans 14:2-6), and the principle he states there binds any act a man does while his own conscience condemns it: “whatever is not from faith is sin” (Romans 14:23 LSB). I acted against mine.

The men who counseled me were right that a Christian family must not live alone. Hebrews commands us not to forsake “our own assembling together, as is the habit of some” (Hebrews 10:25 LSB), and the Belgic Confession says that believers “ought not to withdraw from it, content to be by themselves” (Article 28). That pressure is real. The error lay in the measure. “The best you can find” ranks churches against one another. Scripture measures a church against the Word. The same article of the Belgic Confession that forbids withdrawing from the church binds believers “to separate themselves from those who do not belong to the church, in order to join this assembly wherever God has established it.” Article 29 then gives the marks by which a true church is known: the pure preaching of the gospel, the pure administration of the sacraments, and the practice of discipline. A congregation is judged by those marks.

The same article acknowledges that hypocrites are mixed into the true church. The question that decides the matter is whether a congregation’s leaders will be corrected by the Word. Elders who refuse the Word’s correction have set themselves above it, and Article 29 names that as a mark of the false church: it “assigns more authority to itself and its ordinances than to the Word of God.” A household is not safe under such men.

Paul’s command to keep away from men with a form of godliness stands in the sentence immediately before his warning about men who enter households. The church a man brings his family into is a household’s company just as surely as the feed on his wife’s phone. A man who guards one and opens the other has not understood the duty.

Protection, control, and tyranny

I took my wife off social media. I made that decision a while ago, before this controversy began, and worked toward it gently in my home before we finally made the change. The controversy came a short time later. It caught my attention because it named what I had already done, and I was grateful for how Brian and Eric handled the subject. I told Cathy that I was increasingly uncomfortable with her being on it and that I believed it was hurting her, in her emotional state and in the influence the culture and the world’s events had on her. By her account, I raised it gently at first and more firmly over time, and once she saw how strongly I held it, she said she would get off. We removed the apps from her phone. We talk about it openly, and she has acknowledged the blessing it has brought. In the weeks since, God has blessed our home greatly, and I praise Him for it. I am overwhelmingly glad I did it. I will hold that line, I will not give the daughters in my home social media, and I wish I had drawn the line before.

I did not draw it sooner because I did not have a clear doctrine of the question. Is a husband who restricts what reaches his wife controlling? Is he a tyrant? Or is he protecting her? The culture has catechized Christian men to ask the first two questions and never the third, and I asked them for too long. The Westminster Larger Catechism, Question 130, condemns superiors who sin in either direction, and its words help draw the lines.

Tyranny is rule for the ruler’s sake. The catechism names it “an inordinate seeking of themselves, their own glory, ease, profit, or pleasure.” The tyrant uses his authority to serve his own will, and he lays on others burdens he will not carry himself (Matthew 23:4). God warns the husband directly: “Husbands, love your wives and do not be embittered against them” (Colossians 3:19 LSB). Peter adds that a husband who will not live with his wife “in an understanding way” and show her honor as “a fellow heir of the grace of life” will find his prayers hindered (1 Peter 3:7 LSB). Scripture forbids tyranny, and God disciplines a harsh husband in his prayers.

Control, in the sense that deserves rebuke, is authority pressed past what God gave or into what He left free. The catechism calls it “rigorous” behavior. A husband who rules his wife’s every preference by his own taste, in matters where Scripture has given her liberty, has overreached his office. The comedian who mocked Brian accused him of exactly that: he said a man who wants to “control every aspect of your wife’s life,” down to her time with friends and her screen time, “like a child,” belongs in Islam. The question for any restriction is whether Scripture names the danger it guards against. Scripture names this one in the texts above, and a husband who guards his wife against it is acting inside his jurisdiction. Paul grounds a wife’s submission in the church’s submission to Christ, and he calls the church that submits a bride.

Protection is authority exercised for the good of the one protected, under the Word, by a man who submits to the same Word. It aims at her holiness, as Christ’s washing aims at the holiness of the church, though a husband’s authority is delegated and answerable where Christ’s is perfect. It guards against the things Scripture names: bad company, idle talk passed from house to house, and men who enter households to take captive.

The husband stands under the same Word, and the same Word gives him a different post. A man is sent into the world to contend for the faith (Jude 3) and to guard those in his charge. I use social media for that end. I publish there, I watch, and I stay attuned to the culture I am contending against. I am training my sons for the same fight, and they will have accounts of their own when they are ready to go out with the Word and contend for the faith. Paul’s warnings about idle talk from house to house and about men who take captive weak women describe dangers aimed at women, and I do not carry those temptations the way my wife and daughters do. My temptations are a man’s, and I answer for guarding against them as Job did: “I have cut a covenant with my eyes; How then could I gaze at a virgin?” (Job 31:1 LSB). No man should keep that covenant alone. God commands brothers to “encourage one another day after day, as long as it is still called ‘Today,’ so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3:13 LSB). Men who go into the fight should have brothers who hold them to it by an actual plan, with regular questions asked and answered honestly about what they watch, read, and give their attention to. Equal accountability under God requires every member of a household to be governed by the Word for the post God gave, and different posts carry different rules.

The same answer in the catechism condemns one more sin, and it is the one I committed: “careless exposing, or leaving them to wrong, temptation, and danger.” The husband who never restricts anything is guilty of that sin, however gentle he appears. The test for a husband is whether he can give an account to Christ both for what he restricted and for what he allowed. Christ is the head of every man (1 Corinthians 11:3), and every husband’s authority answers upward to Him.

The Husband who watches

Brian made the point in the episode with Christ Himself. Christ does not leave His bride on her own. He nourishes and cherishes her. He washes her with His word. He gave her His Spirit (John 14:16), and He is with her to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20).

The church has never been an unsupervised woman. Her Husband watches over her, guards what enters her, and will present her to Himself holy and blameless. Every Christian husband’s watch over his wife is a small copy of that watch, and he will answer to that Husband for how he kept it.