Defrauded

The Story

There is a word in the Bible for what is happening in many evangelical marriages, and no one has ever said it to the spouses on the receiving end. Paul uses the Greek verb apostereō twice in his first letter to the Corinthians — eighteen verses apart. Once for commercial theft. Once for spouses withholding sex from each other. The same word. The same letter. The same moral category. In Paul's framework, sexual withholding inside marriage is theft, and theft, in Scripture, is sin. Defrauded names what has gone unnamed in evangelical marriages and walks the deprived spouse through six progressions across twenty-four chapters: the pattern is named (Ch 1–4); the cost to the deprived spouse is described honestly across body, friendships, work, prayer, and the slow numbing (Ch 5–10); the cost to the other spouse is described with equal compassion across responsive desire, purity-culture damage, unnamed trauma, and exhaustion misread for a decade (Ch 11–14); Scripture is laid under all of it across 1 Corinthians 7, the Song of Solomon, Proverbs 5, and the covenant in both directions (Ch 15–19); and the slow covenantal work of return is mapped — naming, conversation, recoupling, and the long arc of recovery (Ch 20–24). This is not a book that gives husbands permission to demand. The right Paul names is the right to be given to, not the right to take. Marital coercion is never authorized by this argument or any argument. What this book authorizes is the naming — the long-deferred conversation, the moment a spouse finally says aloud what has been wordless for years, in words the other can hear and that lay the work in front of both as a shared covenantal task. If you have been carrying this without language, the language is in this book.

Major Themes