There is a moment in Netflix’s Death of the Pastor’s Wife that is hard to sit through. It is just a man, an average modern day non-denominational pastor, preaching — telling the women in front of him that a wife who refuses her husband is opening a door to the devil, that if she does not meet his needs the enemy will set other options before his eyes, and that what happens next is partly her doing. He preaches versions of it more than once, on camera, and the congregation nods along. I heard it and felt sick; the very hairs on my arms stood up. As a married Christian man, it disturbed me that someone would twist the Bible in such a way.
The documentary concerns Mica Miller, found dead at a North Carolina state park in April 2024, two days after serving her husband with divorce papers; her death was ruled a suicide. Her husband — the pastor in those clips — was later indicted on federal cyberstalking and false-statement charges, has pleaded not guilty, and as of this writing has not been convicted. This article is not about that case; nor does it seek to lay blame or cast accusations. It is about the doctrine preached in those clips, which isn’t exclusive to that church, and the plainer question underneath it: what does Scripture actually say a husband and wife owe each other?
What Christ actually says
Before getting to whose fault the lust is, look at what the sermon assumes. Underneath it is a claim about men: that a man’s sexual need is a fixed force of nature, that it has to be discharged somewhere, and that the only remaining question is who absorbs it. Every other part of the doctrine is built on that foundation. Remove it and nothing above it stands.
Christ removed it. Plainly, in a conversation that started with exactly this objection.
He had just finished teaching on marriage and divorce, and He had made it far harder than His disciples expected — what God has joined, no man is to separate, and a marriage is not dissoluble at a husband’s convenience like in the Mosaic Law. Their reaction was blunt: if marriage binds a man like that, he is better off not marrying at all. And notice the assumption sitting underneath their objection, because it is the same one the sermon runs on — that a standard this demanding is simply more than a man can be expected to live under. Here is what Christ said back to them:
“The disciples said to him, ‘If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is not expedient to marry.’ But he said to them, ‘Not all men can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it.’” (Matthew 19:10-12)
Sit with how strange that answer would be if the premise were true. His disciples tell Him a man cannot live under this standard — bound for life, with no way out when it becomes difficult. Christ does not soften the standard and He does not agree with them. He goes the other direction entirely, and holds up men who have given up sex altogether for the sake of the kingdom — not as a tragedy, not as deprivation, not as an unfortunate arrangement for a few unusual men, but as something to be received. A gift given. A good thing, for the one able to hold it. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it.
That is the end of the argument, and it happens before the argument even starts.
If a man can live his whole life without sex and have Christ call it a high calling, then sexual need is not the immovable force the pulpit version requires it to be. It is an appetite — a real one, a strong one, one the Christian tradition has always taken seriously — but an appetite that men have governed by grace for two thousand years. Christ was celibate. Paul was celibate. Monks and nuns have kept that life for the entire history of the Church. Whatever else you conclude, a man simply cannot go without is not a Christian claim. It is a modern claim.
And this is the verse that matters most for the woman sitting in that pew. The moment sexual need stops being an irresistible force, it stops being a debt that anyone else can owe. There is nothing left to charge to her account. What remains is a man, with an appetite, and a choice about what to do with it — which is the subject Christ turns to next.
Whose sin is it, then?
So the appetite is not a force of nature that somebody has to absorb. Then whose problem is it?
The sermon has an answer: the man has needs, the woman is responsible for meeting them, and if she does not, the sin that follows is at least partly hers. Christ addressed that question too, and just as directly:
“If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.” (Matthew 5:29-30)
This is hyperbole — the Church has always read it that way — but the direction of the hyperbole is the entire point. When Christ describes the cost of dealing with lust, every part of that cost falls on the person who has it. His eye. His hand. His loss. Whatever it takes, He says, the tempted man pays it himself.
Now set that next to a sermon telling a congregation of wives that a man’s wandering eye is a bill their bodies are expected to settle. These are not two shades of the same teaching. One is the opposite of the other. Christ puts the knife in the man’s hand and points it at the man. The false doctrine takes the knife out of his hand and points it at his wife.
The passage the doctrine leans on, and what it actually says
The verse reached for in defense of the false teaching is almost always the same one, and it is worth quoting in full, because the full quotation is the refutation:
“The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does. Do not refuse one another except perhaps by agreement for a season, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, lest Satan tempt you through lack of self-control. I say this by way of concession, not of command.” (1 Corinthians 7:3-6)
Four things are being done to this passage whenever it is used as a weapon.
The symmetry is deleted. Paul says it twice, in both directions, in the same breath. The wife does not rule over her own body — and likewise the husband does not rule over his own. It is a statement about two people who have each given themselves away. Individuals will quote it falsely, citing only the first half and turning it into a weapon. But that’s not what the Bible says; the Bible says that two people belong to each other in love.
The consent clause is deleted. “Except perhaps by agreement for a season, that you may devote yourselves to prayer.” Paul explicitly contemplates a married couple abstaining, and the condition he places on it is agreement. Mutual. Not the husband’s permission only, not the wife’s permission only — the couple’s decision. A man who invokes this passage unilaterally has already broken the only rule it contains.
Satan is reassigned. This is the part that should stop anyone who has heard the sermon version. Paul does name the devil here — but look at where the danger comes from: lest Satan tempt you through lack of self-control. The vulnerability Paul identifies is the tempted person’s own lack of self-control. It is a warning to the one who is tempted, about himself. The false preacher version turns it inside out, making the devil something a wife lets in rather than something a husband fails to master.
The genre is changed. Paul closes with “I say this by way of concession, not of command.” He has just finished telling married Christians how to handle a delicate matter charitably, and he flags it as pastoral accommodation. Whatever else this passage says, it is not to be viewed as a legalistic command.
And if anyone wants Paul’s actual standard for what a husband owes, it is a few chapters away in another letter:
“Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her… Even so husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.” (Ephesians 5:25, 28)
The measure given to husbands is Christ on the Cross. Self-gift to the point of death. Every pulpit that preaches submission for wives and stops before this verse is preaching half a passage, and the half it keeps is the half that serves the man holding the microphone.
So what is a marriage, then?
So far this article has been defensive and subtractive — what marriage isn’t and contradicting a false teaching. But scripture is also very clear on what marriage is.
“Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” (Ephesians 5:21)
Peter echoes this. Husbands are to live considerately with their wives, “since you are joint heirs of the grace of life, in order that your prayers may not be hindered” (1 Peter 3:7). Joint heirs — equal standing before God, whatever else differs between them. And the warning is aimed at the husband: treat her as less, and it is your own prayers that get blocked.
But the shape of marriage is older than Paul and Peter. Asked about marriage, Christ went back to Genesis:
“‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh.” (Mark 10:7-8)
One flesh is not a poetic way of describing an arrangement in which one person’s needs are serviced by the other. You do not send your own body an invoice. That is Paul’s own reasoning a few lines past the verse everyone stops at: “no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it” (Ephesians 5:29). Nourishes and cherishes are the verbs. Neither is something anyone does to a debtor.
Scripture even records what one bridegroom prayed on his wedding night. Left alone with Sarah at last, Tobias gets up and asks her to pray with him:
“And now, O Lord, I am not taking this sister of mine because of lust, but with sincerity. Grant that I may find mercy and may grow old together with her.” (Tobit 8:7)
Not because of lust, but with sincerity. Grow old together. That is the whole picture: desire ordered toward one person you intend to still be standing beside in fifty years. It is why the Byzantine rite crowns the bride and groom — crowns of glory, and crowns of martyrdom, because each is asked to die to self for the other. Two crowns. Neither one is holding the other’s.
What the Catholic Church Says
The Catholic Church defends the permanence of marriage as adamantly as any body on earth — and that fact, when misunderstood, can be turned into a cage. Someone living in a violent home hears what God has joined together, let no man put asunder and concludes that leaving would be a sin. So let this be said plainly, because it is the Church’s own teaching and not a softening of it: you are never religiously obligated to remain in an abusive marriage. To state it more clearly, the largest Christian Church in the world, which holds some of the most conservative views on marriage, does not view leaving an abusive situation in order to keep yourself or your children safe as sinful.
The bishops of the United States have said so directly. In their pastoral statement When I Call for Help, they write that “no person is expected to stay in an abusive marriage” — and, in the line worth committing to memory, that “violence and abuse, not divorce, break up a marriage.”
Canon law explicitly states it just so that there is no confusion. A spouse in grave danger of body or soul may separate, and no tribunal, petition, or prior permission is required (canon 1153). Nor does the Church forbid seeking a civil divorce where legal protection is needed — custody, finances, a protective order. Getting yourself and your children somewhere safe is not a failure of faith, and it is not something you need anyone’s approval to do.
Annulment is a separate question, and it is worth being precise about, because the imprecise version of it misleads people at the worst possible moment. A declaration of nullity is not a judgment on how a marriage turned out; it is a finding that valid consent was never exchanged in the first place. Abuse that emerged years later is not, by itself, grounds. But where the controlling behavior was already there when the vows were made — where a man married intending to dominate rather than to seek the good of his wife — that bears directly on whether real consent was ever given. It is a question worth asking. It is also a question that can wait until after you are safe.
What this comes down to
Christ never once told a woman that a man’s sin was her responsibility. When a crowd of religious men dragged a woman in front of Him to make a point with her, He dismantled them and let her go.
The teaching in those sermons needs three things to be true: that a man’s appetite is an irresistible force, that his wife is the one who has to absorb it, and that Scripture says so. Christ denied the first, holding up men who had given the whole thing up and calling it a gift. He assigned the second to the man himself, along with the knife. And Paul, read past the first half of one verse, says the opposite of the third.
So when someone tells you a wife owes her husband her body, you do not need a theology degree to answer it. You need the rest of the sentence he stopped quoting.
If you are in a marriage where you are being coerced, controlled, or frightened, you are not obligated to stay silent, and no scriptural teaching requires you to submit to abuse. In the United States, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788. If you are Catholic and the person you would normally turn to is the problem, you can go over his head: every eparchy and diocese has a victim assistance coordinator whose contact information is published, and reporting to civil authorities is always yours to do.
Scripture. As the apostolic Church read it.
