Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 26:3 (Summer 2012)
Article: Book Review: "Why I Stayed" By Gayle Haggard With Angela Hunt (Tyndale, 2010)
Author: Arbutus Lichti Sider

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PP 26:3 (Summer 2012) p. 24

Book Review: Why I Stayed By Gayle Haggard With Angela Hunt (Tyndale, 2010)

Arbutus Lichti Sider

Arbutus Lichti Sider served as a marriage and family therapist for more than twenty years. Since her retirement in 2006, she consults with local churches to strengthen marriages and families and works with Christians for Biblical Equality against systemic discrimination in the church. She has published articles in The Other Side, Christian Living, the Journal of Christian Healing, and Mutuality.

Gayle Haggard’s Why I Stayed is a spellbinding book. My reflections, as I read it, revolved around three separate but related themes—marriage, mutuality, and “healing through meeting.” We all see the stories others tell about their lives through the prism of our own. I am no exception. I have been married for fifty years this summer to Ron Sider. Since the late 1970s, we have used, as a guide in our marriage, a Christ-centered hermeneutic of biblical equality.1 And, for twenty years until my retirement at the end of 2006, I learned much from others through my practice as a marriage and family therapist.

Gayle Haggard is the wife of Ted Haggard and mother of his five children. After twenty-eight years of marriage, her husband—following a meteoric rise to evangelical prominence as the pastor of a 14,000-member megachurch and as the head of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE)—was accused of having sexual relations with a male prostitute and the use of illicit drugs. In the drama-packed aftermath of that revelation, Gayle found a quiet, private space with her God in which she asked this question: “Who am I going to be in this story?” That night, she writes, “I began my journey of choosing—choosing to love . . . to press through my feelings of anger . . . to demonstrate my love by fighting for the dignity and honor of everyone and everything I held dear” (69). What follows is the story of a courageous, committed Christian wife, willing also to “wrestle with the truth [rather] than live a lie” (65). Gayle is a stellar example of a wife who took her cues from the inner still, small voice rather than from the direct and indirect popular messages she received from church and secular folk alike. She even disagreed with her therapists when they labeled her a “codependent” wife. A strong woman, indeed! I, too, believe their diagnosis missed the mark, but several puzzling questions remain for me.

Nature Of The Marriage Relationship

Those questions led me into my second set of reflections related to the type of marriage that Gayle and Ted had developed. A fascinating love story of two very committed Christians begins with a God-breathed evening beside a campfir...

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