Marriage books. Ever since the LaHaye’s The Act of Marriage, Christian marriage books have been come and gone and almost all of them have been from a conservative, complementarian, how-to perspective. In Choosing Us, Brian and Gail Song Bantum reframe the conversation by simply telling their story. A few weeks ago, Brian joined me on the podcast to talk a little more about that story.
The Conversation | Brian Bantum
This interview excerpt has been lightly edited for clarity and conciseness. Listen to the full interview in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
Josh Olds: Now, I want to start off, this is a marriage book, but it’s not what you might think of when you think of a marriage book. What sets this apart from other books that might be considered in that genre?
Dr. Brian Bantum: Yeah, well, the book really began when Gail—she prays and fasts the beginning of every year, and at the end of this praying and fasting she woke up one day and said, “We need to write a book together.” And, I’ve written books before, and Gail has some books that she wants to wants to write. So we’ve kind of been in ministry together tangentially. We haven’t always served in the same church, but we’ve always had a sense of call together. And that’s always been part of our journey. When we started thinking a little bit about the book that we would write together, initially, it was maybe leadership, or maybe race, or kind of intercultural realities. But the more we started really thinking about it, we realized that there were so many couples, young couples especially, in our lives who were both trying to help each other flourish but didn’t know what that looked like. And inevitably, the woman was kind of having to slow down a little bit. And then a lot of couples that we taught, were dealing with realities of race in the midst of all of the kind of the protests and violence in the United States. And that was having an effect on their relationship.
We realized that there isn’t, there actually isn’t a book out there, that talks about marriage apart from some of those kind of old complementarian kind of viewpoints, where there are very specific roles for the man and very specific roles for the woman, books that actually presume that marriage is between a man and a woman and doesn’t imagine other possibilities of what marriage and covenant life could look like. And we started to realize, you know, this is actually a lot of our story, both our own stories, kind of thinking about what racial life means, as well as trying to think a little bit about what the different ways of imagining how gender shapes our relationship, and how it shapes our imagination going forward. So the idea was let’s offer our story, not necessarily as a kind of, oh, if you do these five things, you’ll have a successful marriage. More just as a sharing of our story. And we hope that people find a different way to imagine what their lives could look like along the way.
Josh Olds: I’ve met so many people over the course of the past few years that have sort of gone down this path of moving away from their more conservative evangelical upbringing to a more progressive faith. They’re deconstructing, but their spouse hasn’t. So they find themselves…they’re the one who moved…and that creates a conflict in the household because those areas can be very contentious. And it manifests itself politically as much as it does theologically. Do you have any advice for people who are in that situation? On how to sort of navigate those conflicts?
Brian Bantum: Yeah, I guess there’s probably maybe two two levels of conflict. So one is the ideological and theological. We have very different beliefs about who God is or about what the Bible is or how to read it. I think to some extent, you could say, you know, “I’ll let God speak through the way that you read,