How Should Christians think about the "Bro Code": A Conversation with Katelyn Beaty

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm James Spencer, your host, and I am joined today by Caitlin Batey. Caitlin has a substack called The Batey Beat, and I just encourage you to go look at that. That's how I was originally introduced to her work. She's also co-host of a podcast called Saved by the City, and the author of a 2022 book, Celebrities for Jesus, which is a fantastic book. I bought it after I found you on substack, Caitlin, and actually read through it and loved it. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being here. And how are you doing this morning? You know, I'm glad it's Friday. It's been a long work week. It maybe has been the same way for you, but yeah, really looking forward to our conversation. I got to say, I've got a little senioritis this week because I'm going on vacation beginning on Sunday. So yeah, I'm kind of itching for the weekend to get here. Yes, I understand. Well, very good. Well, I kind of told you in our pre-interview, but the piece that really I found most interesting when I was reading through your substack, which has a lot of interesting pieces, but the one that drew my attention the most was the pieces were the pieces on the evangelical bro code. And you did, I think, four pieces, if I'm correct, sort of an earlier one. And then you went through and did another series of three. I'm just interested to hear how your process was so interesting in doing that. And so I'm wondering if you'll talk through the process of how you came to the insights you came to about the bro code. And maybe before you start on the process, maybe we should talk about what the bro code actually is. Yeah, that's probably a good place to start. So the initial essay I wrote about the evangelical bro code really arose out of conversations that I was having with other women leaders in Christian institutions, nonprofit organizations, churches. And I was starting to really... I'm a journalist, and so I'm really interested in patterns and trends and trying to see the bigger picture. And I started to connect the dots between the stories that I was hearing and the details that were included, realizing, first of all, a lot of women in Christian organizations are struggling in those spaces. And in general, they were telling me that over time, they were kind of slowly edged out of these institutions, whether by overt or covert bullying, male colleagues who refused to meet with them one-on-one. Sometimes it was the reality of being severely underpaid for their work. Meanwhile, their male colleagues are making significantly more. So gender pay gaps. But really starting to connect the dots to argue that there are many dynamics in evangelical institutions that are hard for women and have been hard for women for a while. These are not really new dynamics. Honestly, I thought maybe they had gotten better. I worked in an evangelical organization for almost 10 years, Christianity Today magazine. Definitely could speak from personal experience about some of these dynamics. But I kind of hoped in 2024, maybe there would be the ability for women to flourish in these institutions. And so the first piece was just saying, this is what the bro code is. This is how women are being affected by it. And then from that received an outpouring of response from women in various sectors, essentially saying, yep, this describes my experience, too. So then my journalist brain is thinking, oh, wow, there's probably a bigger story here. I ended up inviting women to submit their own stories of the bro code. And to this day, have received responses from about 180 women. Now, that's a qualitative sample. I can't extrapolate from that to all of Christendom. But there's certainly a pattern. And so the following pieces were really about unpacking some of the patterns that I saw in the stories that were submitted. And what were some of those patterns? I mean, you lay them out in the, I think, the second article that you wrote. But maybe talk through those patterns so people have an idea of what we're thinking about. Yeah. Well, I landed on an alliteration to help people remember. But the three B's would be breadwinner bias. So that's a shorthand for describing the assumption that on the whole, men in Christian organizations should be paid more because they are the primary breadwinner for their families. The second B is the Billy Graham rule, which is kind of personal ethical code of conduct among some Christian men that they won't meet alone with female colleagues. They won't meet alone with any woman who is not their wife, including female colleagues. And I talk about why that can really disadvantage women in the workplace. And then the third B is just bullying, just whether, you know, bullying can look like a lot of different things, but a kind of intimidation or abuse of power directed at women because they are women, because there are male colleagues of theirs who just don't want to work alongside women and they're slowly edged out. So, yeah, breadwinner bias, Billy Graham rule and bullying. Bullying. And I think maybe we just walk through each one of those. And I think one of the things I found interesting about the breadwinner bias is that you saw not just a gender pay gap in the way we might usually think of it. You know, a woman getting paid less for doing the exact same job a man is doing, but also that deference to men as and the assumption being that they are the breadwinners of the family. That was such an odd one for me because just to be really transparent, my wife has always made more money than I have. And so it was such a weird, like looking at it, I read it and I'm like, yeah, I could see how that would work. It wasn't my experience, but I could totally see instances across my career where I'd watched those kinds of decisions being made. And so it was really more than just a pay gap. It was very much a preferential treatment of and an assumption that this is the social structure that should be in place. And so we've got to support that. Is that a fair? Right. Yeah, definitely. One woman that I spoke with was volunteering at her local church, was happy to volunteer up to a point and then realized, you know, I'm spending 20 to 30 hours working at the church. She wanted to initiate a conversation with church leaders about turning that into a part-time paid position. And the church leader said, well, we assumed that you would be happy to volunteer because your husband makes good money. Which is hard for me to imagine church leaders saying to a man who's volunteering whose wife makes good money, theoretically. This came up a lot in church cultures where, you know, there can be some blurred boundaries around what is what's work? What's ministry? What's serving? And I would, you know, I'm willing to bet most people who work at a church are not there to make a lot of money. But at some point you start to look at how many women are doing behind the scenes kind of thankless but very crucial work to keep the doors of a church open. And at some point they're asking, I'm doing, I'm doing a lot of work, sometimes more work than the men on staff who are getting paid a salary, you know, or a living wage. This doesn't seem right. And it happens to fall along gender lines. It's interesting. I mean, I started in seminary in 1999. So that's kind of dating myself. But one of my professors, I can remember distinctly, he was teaching, I think, a class on the pastoral epistles. And he said to the class, men, your wives should never make more money than you do. And I remember it because in that moment I'm thinking, well, my wife's studying to be a pharmacist. I'm going into ministry. I'm not even sure, like, even on a part-time basis, if you work one day a week, I think she's going to make more than me, you know. And so I'm kind of sitting back. I'm like, does that even ring true with me? Even if I had believed it, I'm not sure how I would have avoided it. But I think it goes to this idea that how deeply ingrained these things can sometimes be that, you know, here you have a professor giving this maxim to a group of people who...

They're going to be moving into ministry and reinforcing this kind of perception where, you know, you're supposed to be the one to take care of the family. These money power dynamics within a marital relationship can be troublesome, and so you need to make sure that you're not somehow diminished within your marriage because you make less, I think is the point he was going for. But it just gives me, when I was reading that, that kind of came back to me, and I was like, wow, this was really deeply embedded in a lot of these circles, even on the educational level. Yeah. Yeah, and I think it's worth underscoring. I imagine that the seminary professor held to traditional complementarian understandings of male-female dynamics in a marriage and in the church. And I honor that many of my fellow Christians come to those convictions earnestly and in good faith. But this maxim that he provided is obviously highly culturally specific. We forget that even the breadwinner breakdown where one person, one spouse, traditionally the husband, goes out and makes the money and comes home, the wife takes care of the home front. That's a relatively new societal setup. For most of human history, men and women have worked together in agrarian societies, like on the farm, in the household together, to provide for their family. So at the very least, a maxim like that should be contextualized instead of it sounding like this is a rule for all people in all time, all marriages, when I think especially in the modern world, only more so now than in 1999, more families feel that both spouses need to work to provide for the family. And women have made incredible gains in the workplace. And I feel that the church should be a place that honors and celebrates that. Yeah. Well, and I think to circle back around to a point you made on the complementarian piece, yes, it was a complementarian school. And I think what I've sort of come around to is the idea that complementarianism doesn't have to lend itself to these sort of biases, though I can see how it often does. And so it's just a question of how do we recognize these biases initially and then build safeguards around so that they don't impact the way the rest of our lives go. I can remember interviewing at a church and they were an elder, you know, male elder only sort of church. But then the question becomes, well, how do the male elders interact with the women to make sure that even if they're not making the decisions, they're having influence over the way the decisions are being made? There were no processes in place for that to even happen. Those are the areas where I see, you know, these kind of biases like the breadwinner bias really falling by the wayside. Like nobody's even thinking about this happening. It's just a, it's sort of a silent suffering that's happening within the church. It goes on and on and on. And it's, it's almost dealt with just on an ad hoc basis. But it never, what I really appreciated about your articles in the process that you went through is it does demonstrate a pattern and it does demonstrate a critical mass of this going on that probably needs to be addressed in a more substantive way than it is right now. Yeah. Yeah. I think the point about how complementarian beliefs relate to these dynamics of the bro code, I do want to underscore that many of the women I heard from would say they're in egalitarian settings or they're in ministries or, you know, I, I heard from several women in higher education where the institution would formally say, we support women in leadership. We want gender parity. So I don't want to single out complementarians. I would say, though, that there, in some of these dynamics, I do think complementarian beliefs and norms kind of give the bro code a kind of momentum or a kind of unchecked, this is just how things are, right? And it's not, it's not until, I think ad hoc, as you said, is unfortunately the case. It's dealing with women who are hurting in a kind of after the fact basis when I think we can all hope there's really Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free Retirement Defense Guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. cultural change and interrogation to be proactive about caring for women in the workplace. Yeah, definitely don't want to suggest that it's rooted in complementarianism, but I agree with you. It does tend to give it that sort of momentum or inertia that tends to reinforce some of these things, perhaps more than egalitarian settings, although not necessarily. And so, as we kind of said at the beginning, or as I mentioned before the interview, you know, these are dynamics that happen even outside of the Christian setting. And so there's no theology in place and it's just sort of one of those weird cultural things that sometimes happens. And so, yeah, very good. And let's move to the Billy Graham rule because one of the things that I found really interesting, I think I may have gotten this off of the Saved in the City episode where you all talked about the bro code. But I think there was reference to men not wanting to meet one on one with women, even on Zoom. And I found that fascinating. I mean, like this meeting couldn't happen for some people. Right, right. Yeah, I I only heard, I only heard of the Billy Graham rule going digital from a couple of women. So I don't know how widespread this is, but that surprised me as well. I think in part because if you want to apply a kind of boundary in interpersonal relationships in the workplace, not meeting one on one in person, that makes more sense to me than we can't talk on Zoom because it just it adds a weird charge to what, I mean, I have to be in Zoom meetings with my boss who's a man with my colleagues who are men all the time to get work done. And they are very boring meetings, right? And so the woman who shared that story with me, she was working in a ministry where, yes, that was she was told she could not meet one on one with her male colleagues over Zoom. She had, she was told that she had to find a chaperone for those meetings. And she just said, that's just so awkward that I never set up meetings with my boss or my colleagues because it adds this charge that shouldn't be there. And it's also asking me to do the work to respect somebody else's boundary. Like if that's your boundary, you should be the one to be taking the responsibility to set it up in the way that you feel like it needs to. Another woman, her, her colleague tweeted something about going on vacation with his family and she tweeted back, oh, have a great vacation. And she was reprimanded for interacting with him publicly in that way. And I, it just, I don't know what's going on there. I don't know if it's specific men worrying that that might look like something to other people, but it's, it's just unfortunate that it, the woman was reprimanded for that when she was doing something rather innocuous and even like a kind thing to say to a colleague. So it's, it, I can't really wrap my mind around the Billy Graham rule gone digital. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Yeah, I, it seems like such an odd arena to draw a line, but, you know, I can see where people would say, well, there could be abuses that take place, but you could say that about anything. You could say that about texting. You could say that about phone calls. You could say that about any sort of communication. And so at what point does it just become sort of ridiculous where, you know, you're barring communication between men and women unnecessarily, you know, just on the off chance that something bad could happen, right? I mean, it, it, it just makes no sense on the digital side. I'm with you, I think on the, on the physical meeting side, maybe, but I also think that, so I was in higher education for 11 years and had a lot

of female employees and female students and all that kind of thing. And our offices all had glass doors. You could look right in. And so you could still have private conversations and meet one-on-one with women or female students or what have you, but there was a transparency there. But that was the same with the men. You know what I mean? It wasn't like I was leaving the door open to talk to women and keeping it closed to talk to men. It was all the same. It's just everybody could peer in and see that I was having a private conversation. And so it just seems to me that there are other ways to crack the nut here, that maybe we're unnecessarily burdening women who could use, you know, younger in their career, use mentorship, use guidance, you know, those kinds of things, and we're just overburdening it. Yeah, and I think the relation to women's advancement in the workplace is really the key issue. A woman who had a very high-up role at a large church in the Midwest, the church leaders had the Billy Graham rule instated. And she was one of the very few women at that kind of top senior leadership level in the church, and that just meant fewer opportunities to meet with her colleagues while her colleagues would kind of get together and go out and do guy things. And I don't think there's any problem with male colleagues going out and doing guy things, but it understandably felt quite exclusionary to her and that there were certain crucial conversations that she needed to have related to HR. I mean, she was working in HR, so these are sensitive, confidential conversations that need to take place kind of one-on-one in a private setting, but for those meetings, she was asked to have a chaperone. And I just think, you know, as much as she loved the church and her job, those onerous rules became too much for her to feel like she had to kind of manage on her own while her colleagues didn't really have to think that much one way or the other about them. Yeah, and I think the interesting part to me as I was reading through this, I'll try to phrase it like this. I think that if the Billy Graham rule is going to be used in the way you're describing it, and you make reference to the Billy Graham rule was not just about this, right? It had other components that have sort of gone by the wayside, but when we reference the Billy Graham rule, often this is the one piece that we're talking about, right? This, you know, don't meet alone with the—if you're a man, don't meet alone with a woman and vice versa. What struck me was that if that's going to be the rule, there almost needs to be an extension of that rule to make sure that you're not showing favoritism to the men. Right. And I've never seen that done. Right. Right? Like I'm always going to have a chaperone in meetings. No one ever gets my private time. But, you know, most leaders would never think to do that. Right. But they're fine cutting out 50% of their workforce and just saying, yeah, you can't meet with me privately. I'm sorry, it's an issue of, you know, potential sexual impropriety, and so we can't do it. Right. It's a very strange sort of thought process that doesn't notice, I think, that you're actually disadvantaging women in that setting. Yeah, I've written about the Billy Graham rule a few different times, and, you know, one of the common points of pushback I get is, essentially, why are you dinging good godly men for wanting to honor their marriages and be above reproach? And I want to honor that instinct. I want to honor that desire among leaders. And also, I think it's way past time those leaders think about how their own personal conscience decisions are negatively affecting their sisters in Christ. And I agree with you that if that is your personal rule, then there needs to be an application of it in a broader way so that it is not discriminatory. I mean, there's no other way that it, you know, if, for example, if you are a man in a leadership position and you only meet with men, well, and you have, you know, a young man and woman who are both coming up in the ranks and want to be mentored, want to learn, want to grow, but you only meet with the young man for mentoring opportunities, it seems quite apparent to me how that would be discriminatory, especially if the young woman, if there aren't other women in positions of leadership that the young woman can turn to for her own mentoring. Which there often aren't because this dynamic's been going on for a very long time. And so... Exactly. It's a really, even when I was in, again, in higher ed, you know, we had some female executives in sort of, let's say, the legal realm or, you know, certain other positions, but there were very few upper-level academic or no female academic deans. The provost wasn't a female. You know, none of those positions were female. And so you sort of have to sit back and ask yourself, well, where does a female faculty member who may desire, heaven forbid, to move into administration, like where would she go? Right. It just, it represents a ceilings, particularly, I think, when the Billy Graham rules in place. So I thought that was very interesting. And I think I did see that one play out more specifically in my experience, which was really interesting. Again, like I said, the glass doors kind of helped me. I never had any complaints about it, but you can definitely see how birds of a feather sort of come, you know, flocking together would be problematic. And so unless you're just sort of generally unfriendly like I was, you know, you're going to develop social relationships with other guys that are going to allow you to network up, you know, or pull those who you're familiar with up into positions. Right. Which does create, it's an issue of partiality, you know. So let's pivot to bullying real quick. Bullying is kind of one of those words that can apply in a lot of different ways. And so I'm really interested to dig into this one. So what do you mean by bullying? Yes, you're right that it is, it's a word that we're hearing more, I think, as more people talk about abuses of power inside various organizations. But yeah, it can sometimes be hard to know. Are we talking about a colleague who's just kind of a jerk sometimes, or is it something more concentrated and directed than that? So one of the women I spoke with for this series, her name is Emily Hyland. She's written and spoken very publicly about her experience working at a church in the Chicago suburbs. She had worked there in a director of operations role for several years. And when the new pastor came in, according to Emily, he basically refused to interact with her. There would be, you know, a series of meetings or conversations where he would talk to everybody else but her. And then meanwhile, he, via email communication, was really what she felt to be, was harsh about her job performance that, you know, she would say she had never received negative feedback on her job performance. And then, according to her, when he came in, he really started to what she felt like was single her out, you know, in a negative way. Sure, sure. So that story, to me, highlighted that bullying isn't always, you know, you have the obvious examples of a boss coming into your office, screaming about something, you know, a mistake that you made. Or being emotionally volatile, kind of controlling the mood of the staff or the organization based on their emotional state. You know, obviously, like name calling, verbal threats, saying things like, maybe you don't belong here anymore. I mean, you have all those stories, which I think could be easily categorized as bullying, but bullying can also be more covert or kind of cold, like edging somebody out over time, refusing to interact with somebody. It can be gossip, you know, it can be like, I don't know if they're as loyal to our mission as the rest of me. Like questioning someone's loyalty to the mission, questioning somebody's Christian orthodoxy, you know, that can come up sometimes with women in higher profile positions in Christian organizations, especially if a certain donor base or vocal minority on the internet is wreaking havoc over this person's presence. They're secretly liberal, they're secretly unbiblical, whatever it is. Yeah. It can look like different things, but the core effect for women is to...

to feel unsafe, and I don't know if that's too soft of a term, but to feel like their footing within the organization is unsteady, that they have to work harder to keep their job, they feel threatened, they might feel like they can't talk to other people about what's going on. Then you get into issues of HR and HR departments not always having great channels for confidential reporting when things come up. Some of this, when questions are raised, it can be, you need to forgive. He didn't mean to be like that. He's having a rough time. Look at how much he's doing for the organization. So some of this is not just the person who is bullying one of their coworkers. It's also a kind of cultural, broader acceptance of the person's behavior and kind of, we don't question the leader or just giving them the benefit of the doubt. Yeah. I like the... There's a lot there and it's not a fun topic, but it's an important topic. No, no, I like the way you describe it. I think the normal abuses of power, I think at least everybody kind of would have an intuitive sense that those are what we're talking about when we're talking about bullying. But I like the way you described the colder activities, the various ways that people in power can actually abuse their positions without it really appearing that they're abusing their positions. Right. You know, like those little, the influence that leaders hold within an organization, the way they talk about other employees, the way they evaluate other employees, the tasks they give them to either set them up for success or failure. Right. All of these things can become ways that if I don't like you, I can make sure that you're not around as long as you'd like to be. Right. Is that a fair way of summarizing it? Yeah. Like that cold aspect of it. Yeah, and I think you're right that because it's covert, it can be harder for other people to name and identify and it can even be harder for the person who's on the receiving end of it to identify. I think everybody knows a boss who comes into your office screaming and using obscenities. Yes, everybody agrees, this is bad, this is bullying. But I think a lot of women who share their experiences of bullying with me would say, for a long time, the kind of, like, is this really happening? Am I making this up? Is this, you know, is he just having a bad day? Did I misread that? Until there is such a clear pattern and intuition that, no, you're not making this up. There is something happening here with this person's behavior to you and their use of power that is making you feel on the margins. This isn't just in your head and you have to try to address it to speak to someone else to, you know, sometimes it's speaking, trying to speak to that person directly. And that can be very risky because you don't know how they're going to respond to your pushback. And if they're already trying to marginalize you, it's probably not going to go well. And just reiterating that kind of path of recourse can be hard to identify. Well, my suspicion in this would be that within an evangelical or Christian organization, that direct confrontation would be even harder simply because it begins to rub against general conceptions of what a man and a woman are in relation to one another. And that sort of direct confrontation would just seem to me to be inflammatory of the situation as opposed to being like an accepted, oh, she's standing up for herself and I've done something wrong and now I need to change. It's more like, why is she challenging me? I'm in leadership here. And so I don't have any, obviously, data for that, but just again, my suspicion is that you can kind of see the people who are willing to bully are probably also going to be willing to take that sort of explicit articulation of a concern in the wrong way. Yes. Yeah, unfortunately, I, and I shared this in the substack essay about bullying, and I don't know to this day whether I would categorize my experience with a former colleague as bullying, but there was an instance where I felt that he interacted with me in an aggressive, harsh way. And I spoke with our boss, you know, we both reported to the same person, and our boss tried to mediate the conflict between us. And my colleague said, you know, I think you're getting really emotional. And like, you're blowing this out of proportion. And that was very upsetting to me, not only because he had been the one to have this emotional outburst in my office. So both of our emotions were heightened. And also, it reinforced the narrative that women are overly sensitive, they take things too personally, they're reading into things, like, they're not cool-headed. So it didn't go as I had hoped, you know, for exactly the reasons that you are articulating that when you're working in institutions that have a foundation of gender hierarchy or very hard and fast gender scripts about, you know, a man is in leadership, a woman is in a submissive role. I don't think those direct confrontations have a chance of going very far. Yeah, I will say I think I've learned this, and I wasn't trying to. Like, I don't want to portray myself as some sort of enlightened man who just figured all this stuff out. I accidentally, I would say, I mean, I guess I intentionally engaged her, but I accidentally had a female executive coach for a year. And that process really was very revealing. Super helpful, really revealing. Having somebody not only with the business acumen to kind of coach me and help me be a better leader, but also coming at it from the perspective of a female, helping me knock off some of these rough edges. I didn't get rid of all of them, but I thought that was really helpful. And then I think the other side of it, though, is my wife and I have sort of helped each other as we've gone through our careers, as we have those kind of conversations about work and, hey, this is what's going on. What do you think I should do? How should this work? There have been times when I'll give her advice and she'll go, yeah, that would work for you. It won't work for me. Like, we need to, let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. Think this. And so that process, I think, of just like reasoning in my head going, well, what would I do and why wouldn't that work? And what could I tell my wife that would be more helpful to her? You know, that process, I think, has really been forming for me because I think you have to, I've had to unlearn a lot of behaviors that I would never have identified as problematic, but were problematic. Yeah. Yeah, and I think that is a really good segue to talking about, you know, so many people kind of at the end of this series on the evangelical bro code have essentially said, okay, how do we fix this? Like, this is clearly a problem. How do we move forward? And I really have come up a bit short. I wanted to underscore for women who are in unhealthy Christian organizations, you don't have to stay. I think some women feel this sense, maybe a Christian obligation to stay, you know, oftentimes because you love the organization, you care about your work. Sometimes it's, how will things change from within unless I stay? And I don't want to squelch the voice of God.

Holy Spirit and women's life, if that is where God has led you to. And also, I just want, I wanted to reassure women, if this is, if you are, you know, if you are having panic attacks coming into work, if you are having a mental health crisis because your boss is bullying you, if you learn about a gross pay gap and realize going to a secular corporate organization would, at least when it comes to pay, honor my work and my training and my talents more than this. So you don't have to stay out of this sense of Christian duty. And part of why I wanted to underscore that is because I, I don't think it's women's responsibility to change these dynamics ultimately. I think a lot of this rests with men in positions of leadership. And I, I know a lot of men in these organizations who want to do the right thing. You know, they want to honor their female colleagues. They want everybody to flourish in the organization. They don't want to tolerate bullying. Yeah. Um, it can be, but it can be hard to know how to change an institutional culture. And sometimes it only takes a few, I mean, you know, the saying is a few bad apples spoiled a bunch. Uh, I think that is, I think that is true. And it's hard to know sometimes to do with the bad apples. But the point being, I think there's some work that, that Christian men need to do around these, these issues and your, your examples of meeting with, you know, just the fact that you have, you're married to someone who is a professional, who's wrestling with her own workplace questions and challenges. You're in this open conversation about that, where you're learning things about her experience in the workplace as a woman that aren't true for you, as well as meeting with a female executive coach. Um, I think just the, the willingness to keep growing, you know, and to keep being formed is, is huge because it's, it would be so easy to just accept bro code dynamics as a bro because they really work for you. Like that's, that's how it was designed. It's designed to kind of work for you. You don't have to resist it or uh face its fallout in a direct way. So I think a lot of this is maybe even a, a kind of opportunity of spiritual formation for, for some Christian men in these organizations. Yeah. And I think, well, I understand it gives us a privilege within the workplace, but I can remember when I first got my job, so I was out of work for a long time. Couldn't find a faculty position, like, um, just had been, uh, rejected from a number of different jobs. I was finishing my PhD up, couldn't find a job. So I hopped into, uh, as an assistant dean of online education, been working there maybe six months, maybe a year, somewhere in that time range. And my boss came in, sat down on my desk, kind of up above me in my chair. And he just said, James, I think you're getting by on your good looks and charm. And, and at the time that, you know, you don't really know how to take that. No. But, but I think as I reflected on it, I was like, I probably am because I can, like, I looked enough the part at the institution that I was working in that I could just get by. I didn't actually have to do much more than that. I just had to sort of be one of the boys. Right. And so I think there's a sense in which now in my situation, I didn't want to lose my job. I, you know, I, I had a lot wrapped up of self-identity in me working and earning a paycheck and, you know, contributing to my family and contributing just professionally. So I didn't want to lose my job. So it was the kick in the pants that I needed to sort of actually start working and, and moving beyond just being a bro. But I can also see how that throughout my career very much helped me. You know, as long as I didn't, uh, rock the boat too much, there were things I could get by with that other people couldn't. Yeah. And so it was a very strange sort of situation where I would say on a professional level, it was extremely helpful. Wouldn't deny that on a character building and spiritual level. It was corrupting. It was very hindering. And, and I think that's a, that's part of what, when we talk about the solution to this, I think we got to get back to something that looks more like character matters more than results. Yeah. And then as we're as whoever's in leadership, men, man or woman, I think we have to just embrace the idea that crap rolls uphill, that if this is going on in your organization, it's yours to deal with. And, and I think that's really difficult for most people. They want to sort of do what your boss did and kind of mediate a situation. It's like, no, mediation can go mediation work, but at some point somebody's got to actually take control of the situation. Yeah. Deal with, deal with the root issues. And right. So I don't know, it was just, there's a couple of my thoughts, like, like that character matters more than results, which is really hard to pull off in most organizations that have to get results. But then also that idea that no, the leader is whatever the leader is allowing, he's endorsing. Yes. Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing that. And I'm, even though it was an odd comment, I'm sure to receive from a coworker, it sounds like it kind of was a, it, it prompted a kind of gut check for you to acknowledge, um, you know, at the end of the day that you could actually be showing up in a more holistic, uh, character centered way instead of just getting by. And don't we want that for anybody, anybody in a, in a position of leadership in a Christian institution. And I also just think, go ahead. Oh, sorry. I was just gonna say, I, you know, I don't want to frame this as like me as the hero. So I think that came much later. I think my initial reaction was very much a guy reaction. It was a, um, I've been challenged to a fight. Now I'm going to jump in the ring. And so it was more aggressive and uh almost anger fueled. Yeah. I'm going to show him kind of feel to it, which I think is a very, it's a reaction. Again, as my wife and I have talked, it's a reaction that men are allowed to have generally. Mm-hmm. And it's seen as something that's very good for them to have. Right. And I would argue that ultimately I had to move past that to mature and get to this point where it's like, no, I don't, I don't really care what he said, but if there's some truth to it, I want to take that into account and change. So yeah, I, I did not respond to it well in the moment, but I, I think I, I think it eventually helped me move beyond that to some degree. So anyway, I just want to. Yeah, that's helpful. Yeah, I mean, you, it sounds like, you know, before our conversation, you talked about the fact that so many of these dynamics are present in mainstream non-Christian organizations and companies. And on some level, I can imagine people who work in the secular world saying, Look, the things that you're dealing with in these Christian, if you only knew the things that I have had to deal with. Probably. I think especially, I think especially of an older generation of women, you know, kind of entering the workforce in the 70s and 80s, where they literally might have been the only woman in the room for two decades. And they're like, you think, you think your situation is hard. So I, I acknowledge that these dynamics exist in almost every institution and sector of society. Yeah. And also, I want to say as a, as a Christian, as someone who cares about the witness of Christian organizations and the witness of the local church, don't we want to be different and better? Don't we want to be different from and better than the patterns and assumptions that we see in the world quote unquote. And we have a, a story given to us in scripture and in church history of women being honored, being, being lifted to a place of honor and respect that cuts against so many of the attitudes and behaviors of the rest of the world. And so this, this just feels like, um, This isn't just a matter of making sure that women in the church are flourishing. It's also a matter of, of cultural witness to a watching world so that we can say, actually, we're places where women can flourish. I know that they deal with all this junk everywhere else, but this is a place where women are treated with dignity and respect and given a place at the table. And not just out of a sense of, I guess we should do this, but we need your insights. We need your talents. You trained, you know, you've spent years and money to prepare yourself for this kind of job. We want, we want all of your talents. Like we, we can't.

to afford not to have you in our organization. Yeah. I think, number one, I think that's going to require a lot of ministries to slow down. It almost has to be something where you sit back and say, we're going to do this whether it works immediately or not. So I would recognize that, yes, I think we want to leverage all the talent, male, female, whatever, in the best ways we possibly can. And that long-term, that is absolutely the right way to go. I think the mind shift that's going to have to happen is, it may not be a short-term win. It's just the right thing to do. Yes. And on some level, you honor the person and you trust that to play out however it's going to play out. But compromising, honoring the person is probably never going to take us where we actually want to go, which I love the cultural witness aspect that you're drawing out. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And ultimately, if organizations, when you're just thinking about effectiveness and impact, ultimately, if you want to retain the most talented employees, you have to be a place where women feel like they can show up as their full selves. Because the reality of the workplace is that when it comes to advanced degrees and gains in various sectors, in a lot of ways, women of my generation are outpacing the men of our generation. So if you're just thinking in terms of effectiveness, it is also a value, not just from a sense that this is the right thing to do, but also, we want to be a place where women want to work. We don't want to lose out on their talent. That's a great point. Let me, I know we're kind of coming up on time. I want to ask one more question. It's sort of connected to your book, Celebrities for Jesus. And so this is just something that I've been thinking about a lot. And I don't have any particular agenda in asking the question. I just want to get your thoughts on it. So we have a lot of this, you know, when we talk about how do we solve the problem of the bro code? There's also this celebrity angle that you talk about in your book, right? Where everything has become very splashy and out there. And the presentation of who we are has almost outpaced the substance. You know, sort of the phrasing I would use. But then as you're doing your work as a journalist, and you're thinking through, how do I present some of these ideas like the bro code out there in the world? How do I present stories maybe about women who have had this happen to them? How do you balance or even avoid the tendency for celebrity type thinking, right? You know, it almost has this, it feels like so many of these conversations are, they don't gain appropriate substance because we're just on to the next thing, right? And so how do you think about that? I know it's kind of an odd one, but yeah. How do you go about thinking about that? Yeah, that's a great question. And basically, how do you write and talk about things of substance in a media ecology of this is interesting. Oh, but there's this Instagram ad. Like our attention spans have been trained to be lightning quick. And the internet is not always a great place for deep thinking. No. And I, you know, when I'm writing for like a mainstream national outlet, I understand that oftentimes what their editors deem to have national import often involves somebody with a public figure, you know, somebody with some form of celebrity status. So there are times when I try to start there, you know, maybe with the particulars of the celebrity figure, but then try to talk about the deeper dynamics that I tried to underscore this in my book. The problems of celebrity aren't just about the specific individuals who have celebrity. It is about our own desire to put people on pedestals. You know, we are feeding the problem in our hearts and minds and with our wallets and with our attention. So using specific stories to then talk about broader dynamics and trends that implicate the reader and the writer, you know, always like I'm implicated in whatever I'm writing about. Yeah. That's what I that's what I try to do. And I it just as an aside, I have Really pivoted away from certain platforms. I think Substack feels preferable because it's a long form written medium and I don't have to figure out how to create a reel, you know, to get people to engage what I'm trying to say. Thank goodness I don't have to figure out a reel. I just think the medium itself hopefully lends itself to a bit deeper reading and thinking than than other platforms. Well, and the podcast, I think, does that for you as well. I'm assuming, you know, sort of save by the city. You, you get to have more substantive conversations with guests or with your co-host. And it, it, it just sort of lends itself to a longer form, deeper dive into these issues. Whereas Instagram, yeah, TikTok, less so. Yes, Twitter or formerly Twitter. Definitely. Even though that used to be my, my primary platform. And then, you know, it's, it does not foster. I wouldn't say it's a character building platform for many reasons. So I have spent much less time there than I have in years past. So that is a fair characterization. Yeah. Well, very good. I appreciate you entertaining that last question. I know it wasn't one I mentioned to you, but it's just something that's on my mind a lot. And I really enjoyed the Celebrities for Jesus. And so that was a, that was a topic that I didn't know people were writing on out there. And that I've been thinking about an awful lot. So I appreciated the work and yeah. Well, Caitlin, thanks for being here today. I, I think this is a really important conversation for the church to be having. I think we've got to sort of figure out how to get around the bro code, recognize that it hurts women primarily. Obviously, I think that's the biggest presenting issue, but I don't think it does men any favors either. Yeah. I totally agree. Yeah. It's holding everybody back and we really need to address it. So I appreciate you being on. I appreciate you writing your articles and folks, if you're out there listening, I will have links to the Beatty Beat, to Saved by the City and to Celebrities for Jesus in the show notes. I'd really encourage you to check Caitlin's work out. It is excellent and I would wholeheartedly recommend it. So thanks for being here, Caitlin. And thanks for everything. Thank you so much for having me. Absolutely. Thanks everybody for joining us. And we'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. 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