Allie Beth Stuckey (0:01)

Is being a mom boring or intellectually stimulating? I've got a tip for how you can answer really fun but theological challenging questions in your home. Also, surprise, surprise, Russell Moore has misrepresented me yet again. And toxic empathy in the pages of Christianity Today. And Bri and I will be judging all of the best and worst Met Gala outfits. We've got all of this and more on today's episode of Relatable. It's brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to good ranchers ranchers.com use code ALI at checkout. That's good ranchers.com code ALI. Hey guys. Welcome to Relatable. Happy Tuesday. Hope everyone is having a wonderful week so far. If you have not watched or listened to yesterday's episode, if you have not shared it, if you have not shared it and tagged Elon Musk or Pam Bondi, I need you to do that. I don't get anything out of that. I just want awareness about what is going on with Kindercare, who is getting hundreds of millions of dollars of our tax money and systemically covering up the abuse of children. Like, I want them to be brought to justice. I want people to know about this, but also our government needs to know about this. Doge needs to know about this, and the Justice Department needs needs to know about this. Because children matter. And this is why politics matter. Politics matter because policy matters. Because people matter. Politics affects policy. Policy affects people. People matter. Especially people with no political capital, no means to defend themselves, children. And so something needs to change there in yesterday's episode and specifically Edwin's really courageous and thorough reporting has the potential to make a difference. But I need all of your help in amplifying that. All right. Got quite a few things to talk about today. It is going to be. This is such a a representation of all that you can expect on Relatable. We will be talking about culture, we will talk deeply about theology, but then we are also going to talk about the Met Gala. Somehow it is that time of year again. I feel like the Met Gala was like last week and yet here we are judging Met Gala outfits again. For some of you, you absolutely love it when we talk about the Met Gala. And some of you, you don't like when we judge outf you don't like the outfit judgment part of Relatable, then I would just skip past that. And in this episode early. But for those of you who love that, you are in for a treat. All right, before we get into all of it, let me remind you to sign up for Share the Arrows, y'all. It's going to be amazing. It's not just for moms. It is for any Christian woman, no matter what stage of life you are in. And it is only only for women. This is not a conference where you can bring your husband, where you can bring your guy friend. It's not for them. They have their own men's spaces and men's conferences. It is so important for me to have Share the Arrows be a theological training and equipping conference only for women. We are hearing from Alisa Childers. We've got Ginger Duggar Vola. We've got Shauna Holman and Taylor Dukes. They're going to be on an all star amazing holistic health panel, which I'm so pumped for. We've got your favorite Katie Faust. Francesca Battistelli is coming back to lead us in worship. We've got two more speakers who will be leading us in a motherhood apologetics equipping panel, which again, I am just so excited about. It's going to be amazing. It's going to be here before you know it. I don't want you to miss out. I don't want you to have fomo. So related bros, those of you who are listening to or watching this, you need to go to share the arrows.com Go ahead, get your girl, get your relate a relate a bell in your life tickets to Share the Arrows. Maybe go ahead and get two so she can bring a friend. Or maybe you can collude with a fellow Relate a bro and y'all can both get tickets for your wives. They will be so excited and so pumped about that. We've got different VIP options too, but the general mission is going to be amazing. I am so, so excited about the encouragement that we will receive that day. And of course I will be speaking to you. I always forget to mention. So go to share the arrows.com and get your tickets today. All right, let's talk about this debate that is going on all over social media. It started last week when someone who I guess fancies herself some kind of conservative commentator, although she is very pro choice and pro a lot of values that most conservatives and certainly Christian conservatives don't align with. She posted a video talking about the trad wife trend and how conservatives the Republican Party really shouldn't be promoting the trad wife lifestyle, shouldn't be promoting hobbies such as baking sourdough. She says that she's all for it, that she promotes traditional values, but she also says that you really need to find a new hobby that makes you money. She says, guess what, baby girl? That lifestyle, working out a provider, you just get to sit at home, bake bread every day. Slim to none, I would say none. And that's going to work out for you. Or quite literally anyone you know. Is that the real transcript of what? What the video. Okay, I'm not totally sure exactly what that means. And then she goes on to say, like, you guys are cringe. She says, okay, let's bring some other things to the table besides sourdough. Guys want to be mentally stimulated as well as physical, okay? And so this caused a large debate online. People obviously took issue with what she said. Steve daughter Anastasia Hibb said, you need to follow God's calling for your life. If he's calling you to stay at home and provide for your family by cooking, cleaning and taking care of children, then that is honorable because God called you to do so. Making fun of women because they're following God's calling for their life is cringe. Joel Berry of the Babylon Beast said, my wife was trad before it was a trend. We were willing to be poor to make it happen. Totally worth it. Stay at home moms contribute more than sourdough. They are doing the most important work of all, the formation of the souls of our children. John Mason, whom we've talked to before, he says his wife had no interest in being a trad wife, but she did have every bit of interest in being a biblical wife and a mother at the age of 26 when we got married. She's a mother of six beautiful children that she's raising, nurturing, equipping and educating in Christ. Caitlin Francis is another X user. She says quoting stay at home mom isn't intellectually stimulating. She says, ma'am, I have more conversations with my children about theology, politics, history and or culture before 9am than you could ever dream of having with your woke co worker in the break room. This is a random account, but this is just kind of funny. She said, new Emom I don't know who this person is. My husband doesn't want to be mentally stimulated by me. When he gets home at 7pm he has to save up his final brain cell for whatever deep philosophical question our four year old swings at him at bedtime. Gosh, that is. That is so true. Okay, so I obviously have thoughts about this as someone who has talked about this whole trad wife trend in the past and who also is a traditional woman who is a wife and a mom and a Christian and I think it's great for women to stay at home. Obviously, I have this podcast which affords me a lot of flexibility to still prioritize my family and doing something that I love and also feel called to. But I do believe that there are some jobs that are simply not conducive to motherhood when your kids are really little, like most corporate jobs, a lot of jobs that are completely inflexible. And so I am all for moms staying at home full time. Now, that might mean she's also a sub stack writer, or maybe that means that she is also, I don't know, a swim lesson teacher. Or maybe she also has an Etsy shop as an artist in some way, I. Most moms that I know who stay home are also doing other things with the other talents that God has given them while still prioritizing their kids and their family. And I think all of that is. I think all of that is great. Um, what I don't agree with when it comes to this trad wife trend, as I've talked about many times, is the attempt to make traditionalism, or being a traditional wife and mom, into an aesthetic. The trad wife trend online is largely, not exclusively, but largely a cosplay by women who are working, while they are also telling you that they're not working and that you should not work. So they're spending 8 to 12 hours a day making content. And it's not the work that bothers me as much as just the hypocrisy of that. I mean, I think that women can work in a way that allows them to prioritize their family. This job allows me to do that. But there is a dishonesty and trying to promote a particular lifestyle that makes it look like you live in the 1800s, and that makes it seem like this is the only way to live the Christian biblical life. Living on a homestead and, you know, raising chickens and baking sourdough, when that is not the same thing as being a biblical woman. All of those things can be good. And there are millions of women across the country who actually, honestly live that life, but aren't trying to promote it as some kind of superficial esthetic. And a lot of the women, again, who are promoting that aesthetic and are trying to create some kind of rule book for what it looks like to be a feminine woman or a biblical woman don't actually possess those values themselves. And so I've always said it's much more important to be biblical than it is to be, quote, unquote, traditional, because traditions are started by man. And they can be really good, especially when they're rooted in scripture, but they have to be rooted in scripture in order to be good. You can live a biblical wife life as a single woman or as a wife that doesn't have children yet. You can live a biblical life of biblical womanhood if you live in New York City or if you live in the middle of nowhere, or if you live in the suburbs. And so I just think it's really important that our standards are actually set by scripture and not by social media. And so I'm not necessarily against all criticism of this like whole trad trend. What I am against is this critique that if you are a stay at home mom or if you are a quote unquote traditional wife, that you are not being intellectually stimulated and that you are not able to bring anything intellectually to your home or to your husband, because that is just not true. So I have three points to make on that. And then I've got some sub theological points within that that I want to make. So I'm going to take us on a journey here. So here's my first point. The first point is that being intellectually stimulated is important for every person. You will never hear me say, oh well, there's just a season of time where you shouldn't be learning, you shouldn't be growing, you shouldn't be reading. It's okay if you're dumb. It's not. Christians are called to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, mind, soul and strength. We are called, if we are moms, to teach our children. We are called, if we are any kind of Christian woman, to mentor other women, to learn from other mentors. That means that we should be reading our Bibles, that we should be talking about the Bible, we should be knowing theology, we should have the ability to reason. We should be praying for wisdom as the book of James tells us to do. And we should be applying all of these things to whatever task is at hand. So whether you are single and working, or whether you are a stay at home mom, women have a brain. They have a brain that needs to be exercised and sharpened and used every single day. Any hyper patriarchy bro who asserts that it's unimportant for a woman to be smart or well read or well spoken, I think is just insecure and they are out of step honestly with church history. If you look at the Puritans, if you go back to the women of the Bible, Lois and Eunice, that passed down their Christian faith Their theology to Timothy. To Timothy. We see Akila and Priscilla corrected the theology of Apollos. And that was a couple. Priscilla obviously being the woman. But the Bible says that both of them, they knew the gospel well and they were able to correct the theology of this very articulate Apollos. Mary's Magnificat demonstrates a deep understanding of theology. Women in all stations should steward well the mind that God has given them for his glory and the good of other people. In fact, if fewer women allowed our feelings to outpace our thinking, we would not have so many of the cultural and moral issues we have today. We see that in how the majority of women vote. Okay, so that's my first point. I agree or I think that women should be intellectually stimulated and that we can and should bring a lot to the table intellectually. Number two, being a girl boss is not always intellectually stimulating. In fact, many professions actually reward you for falling in line, following protocol without asking questions, pleasing your boss, and that's it. In fact, in corporate America, you are expected to center your thoughts, police your speech, limit your creativity so that you don't rock the boat. The right words, say the right words, follow the rules, and you can get ahead, especially if you are a woman. Intellect, critical thinking, creativity are not required in many, many jobs today. So I just want to say working outside of the home or having, like, additional hobbies outside of being a wife and mom does not guarantee that you are going to be smart, that you are going to be challenged intellectually, and that you're going to be able to bring more to the table regarding intelligence. There's just no guarantee of that because so many realms of the world today outside of the home do not reward being smart and thinking critically. And here's the third point. Here's where we're going to go on a little bit of a theological journey. Being a mom can absolutely be intellectually stimulating. It absolutely can. A lot of it is more physically and emotionally tough in the early years. But if you wait until your child turns 4, 5, and 6, you will see that this is not a time, as a mom, to be dumb. This is a time where we are using our brains a lot. You better be really smart because your kids are about to ask you some really, really smart questions. As long as you're not pacifying them with a screen all day and you're allowing their mind to work and observe things and ask questions, they are going to ask you things that really challenge you. Now, let me give you a caveat before I get into the Rest of that point. I know that I say all of this as someone who has a podcast. I write, I do speaking engagements. My husband and I work together full time. I have lots of opportunity to talk to adults throughout most of my days. So I'm not discounting the importance of having adult time in order to stimulate your mind. In fact, I think you should. You should be going to church, you should be meeting up with other moms when you can, maintaining friendships however you can going to Bible study. Now, maybe you can't do all of that in one day or sometimes even in one week, but it is important for adult community. But even outside of that, your kids, even if you stay at home all day and you don't have other adult time, I can tell you when I don't have other adult time. When I'm not podcasting, when I'm not talking to people about, you know, cultural things and theology, my kids absolutely challenge me and challenge my brain and challenge my heart. And my oldest is especially, has been asking so many good questions about creation, about the fall, about heaven. Everything, it seems like, turns into some kind of opportunity to talk about what's true and what's not. So when she asks me, for example, like, why did God put the snake in the garden? Or do bad guys go to heaven? Or why did. This is a recent one. Why do people celebrate Passover if kids died? Like, I need to know my Bible to help navigate the right answers. And an aside on this point, but this is like part of the journey, so it's a really important and kind of long aside on this particular point. I want to give a little bit of advice that I shared on Instagram and I'm going to flesh it out and I'll show you how I kind of do this, not only with my kids, but with myself. So on these theological questions that really challenge you, I just want to encourage you that you don't have to know every answer. Maybe you're a new Bible reader, or maybe your child is asking a question that no one fully knows because those questions exist. You know, scholars haven't even been able to answer some of the questions that your kids are going to ask you. It is always safe to go back to the three GS and I will explain that in just a second. I will explain what the 3Gs are in a moment. But let me pause and tell you about our sponsor for the day, and that is seven Weeks Coffee, y'all. I love Seven Weeks Coffee. They are the real deal. They started this company because they want to glorify God. They want to save babies and they want to serve you really, really good, high quality, great tasting coffee. And that is exactly what seven weeks coffee accomplishes. 10% of every sale of their high quality, mold and pesticide free coffee goes to pregnancy centers across the country. And get this, they have raised over $900,000 because of you guys that has been donated to these pregnancy centers across the country that are literally saving the lives of babies. That's why it's called seven Weeks Coffee. At seven weeks gestation, that baby in the womb is the size of a coffee bean, yet he or she is made in God's image and therefore his or her life really matters. So you can allow your coffee to serve a higher purpose by skipping out on the secular God hating, pro abortion coffee companies and instead getting your coffee. From 7 weeks subscribe to 7 weeks coffee. That'll save you 15% plus when you use my code ally you save an extra 10%. Go to 7weekscoffee.com use code ALLI at checkout for that discount that 7weekscoffee.com code ALLI foreign asks you a question. You don't know the answer immediately. Or maybe you do know the answer, but you just don't know how to say it in a way that they will fully understand. Here are three things that you can always go back to. It's a really safe way to answer any question about God or the Bible. Number one, God's goodness. So God is good. Everything he does, he dies out of his goodness. We know that. And then the second G is God's glory. God does everything for his own glory, even when we don't understand it. And then the third G is the Gospel. So God's goodness and glory show up most in the Gospel which says God sent his only son Jesus to die on the cross for our sins so that we could be friends with God and live forever with Him. Everything points to that. And actually it's not just that these three GS can help you answer questions that your kids ask. They can help you in your own thinking as you think through the answers to questions for yourself or as you come across a passage that is really difficult and you don't really understand. Maybe it's hard to see God's goodness and glory. I think this is true especially throughout the Old Testament. Don't beat yourself up for asking those questions or feeling uncomfortable. A lot of the Bible is uncomfortable because not everything is prescriptive. A lot of it is just descriptive, telling you terrible things that happened. But a lot of Things we see God allowed happen or God even caused to happen or told his people to do that makes us feel uncomfortable today. But when we shift our own thinking into focusing on the three GS, how can I see God's goodness, God's glory, and the Gospel in this passage? Like, it really shifts things. It really changes what we get out of Scripture and how we seek God when we are reading Scripture. So let me give you an example of this. The question that I got why do people celebrate the Passover if the firstborn sons of Egyptians died? And I'm not about to tell you what I said to my daughter. This is a lot deeper and more complicated than that. But it's a good question for us, I think, as we're reading a passage like this. So if we start with the knowledge that God is good and he does things for his own glory and that the gospel truth that he would send his son to die for our sins exist throughout Scripture. If we start with those assumptions, we can then understand that Passover is celebrated not because of the death that occurred, but because God was making a way for his people to be saved. So it took this action, this very tragic action, this killing, to convince Pharaoh to let God's people go and to free them from slavery. And the lamb's blood that was placed over the door frames of the houses of Israel that signaled God's spirit to pass over them was actually a signifier of the Gospel. It was a signifier of what was to come. The blood of the final spotless lamb, Jesus, which cleanses us from sin and saves us from eternal death. And also an interesting point. In Exodus 4:22, God calls Israel his firstborn son. So he says, you. I'm paraphrasing Egypt and Pharaoh, you're killing and oppressing my firstborn. I will now kill yours. So here he kills his enemy's firstborn son to save his own firstborn son, Israel. But in the New Testament, what does God do? He kills his own son to save his enemies who become his sons and daughters. So in the Old Testament, God kills his enemy to save his children. In the New Testament, God kills his child to save his enemies. How incredible is that? These are the verses that come to mind for me when I'm thinking through that passage. And the first One is Romans 5:15. And it's for if many died through one man. So that's Adam's trespass. Much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man, Jesus Christ abounded for many and then there's also Colossians one. I love that whole chapter. I always have. It refers to Jesus as the firstborn of all creation. So in verse 18 we read he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. So above and before Israel is Jesus Christ, both the Redeemer for Israel and for Gentiles. And in verse 21 of Colossians 1, Paul says, and you who were once alienated and hostile in mind doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him. So all of the death and the sacrifice and the warring for the promised land and the punishment for sins, and these celebrations of God's provision in the Old Testament, all of it points to Jesus. All of it is a signifier of the Messiah that God had preordained to save his people once and for all, for their good and his glory, and all the pain and all the sickness and all the sin and all the injustice that still goes on today, all of these two are signals of what is to come. So the tension builds. Satan is desperate. Evil abounds. And yet God is not doing nothing about evil. His wrath is kindling. He will one day come back and avenge his people. He will punish all wrongdoing. He will do away with wickedness forever and ever. Psalm 37 assures us of that. It assures us that we have nothing to worry about when it seems like the bad guys are winning. God will take care of them and we can be at peace trusting that so God is good and God will be glorified. And God's Gospel is the most prominent display of this goodness and glory. And it is woven throughout the Bible, throughout history. It is the lighthouse guiding us home. And that kind of thinking, those three GS, can be applied to every single theological question, every single passage in the Bible. And that shift in perspective, it will change how you read scripture and it will change how you teach your kids. So to the moms, to the stay at home moms, to the Christian moms in particular, we are called to not only put our bodies into motherhood, but our brains into motherhood, our hearts into motherhood. And God has both called and equipped us to do that because we are raising the next generation of moms and dads and leaders and missionaries and pastors and voters. And the last thing we need, the very last thing we need, is intellectually, morally inept moms. And that is part of why? By the grace of God. This show exists because women are smart and we have the capacity to think and to reason and to research and to teach in the right context. Don't freak out and edify and mentor and help shape culture in a way that glorifies God. To raise a respectful ruckus for the things that matter, to push back against the lies that are most pervasive among women, like toxic empathy, like the cult of self affirmation. And guess what? You do not have to have a podcast or a platform to do that. You don't have to be an influencer to have influence. You can do that as a mom. You can do that as a wife. You can do that as a single woman. Another message you've heard me say is that your Christian life, your calling, does not start when you get married and have kids. Those things matter immensely. They are so important. We should cherish them a lot more as a culture than we currently do. But for the Christian woman out there who is waiting to become a wife and a mom, I always just want to remind you that the fullness of joy is there for you right now in the presence of Christ. Not when your relationship status changes and not when you have children. That's actually a trick of the devil to get you to be discontent and ungrateful for what you currently have, to make you believe that you cannot have peace and joy and fulfillment into some future date that may not even come. By the way, remember, today has enough trouble of its own. But those are my thoughts on that. That as a mom, you have plenty that challenges you in all different kinds of ways. And let us just make sure, though, that whether we're a mom or not, but especially if we're a mom, that we are stepping up to the task and that we are using the fullness of the minds that God has given us to his glory for the good of those around us, including for the good of our children. All right, that's all I want to say to weigh in on that debate. And let's see. We've got about 18 minutes left. Bri, what should we do? Should we go straight into the Met Gala, or should I talk about Russell Moore? Russell Moore, Met Gala. He wasn't at the Met Gala.