Biblical Battered Wife Syndrome: Christian Women and Domestic Violence

By Kathryn Joyce, Religion Dispatches. Posted February 2, 2009.

Escaping an abusive marriage is no easy task for many evangelical women, many of whom have pastors that say physical abuse is no reason for divorce.

What is a good enough reason for divorce? Well, according to Rick Warren’s Saddleback church, divorce is only permitted in cases of adultery or abandonment — as these are the only cases permitted in the Bible — and never for abuse.

As teaching pastor Tom Holladay explains, spousal abuse should be dealt with by temporary separation and church marriage counseling designed to bring about reconciliation between the couple. But to qualify for that separation, your spouse must be in the “habit of beating you regularly,” and not be simply someone who “grabbed you once.”

“How many beatings would have to take place in order to qualify as regularly?” asks Jocelyn Andersen, a Christian domestic violence survivor and advocate, author of the 2007 book Woman Submit! Christians and Domestic Violence, an indictment of church teachings of wifely submission and male headship. As she sees it, by convincing women that leaving their relationships is not an option, these teachings have laid the ground for a domestic violence epidemic within the church.

Andersen writes from personal experience, describing an episode of being held hostage by her husband — an associate pastor in their Kansas Baptist church — for close to twenty hours after he’d nearly fractured her skull. Andersen was raised in the Southern Baptist Convention, where she heard an unremitting message of “submission, submission, submission.” She saw this continual focus reflected in her ex-husband’s denunciations, while he detained her, of women who wanted to “rule over men.” Though Andersen was rescued by her church’s pastor, who had his assistant pastor arrested himself, she says other churchwomen aren’t so lucky, particularly when churches tell couples to attend joint marriage counseling under lay ministry leaders with no specific training for abuse survivors, who instead offer an unswerving prescription of submission and headship, often telling women to learn to submit “better.”

Pastor Holladay takes care in the taped sessions to explain that enduring abuse is not a part of a wife’s call to submit to her husband — a principle that Warren and Saddleback espouse. “There’s nowhere in the Bible that says it’s an attitude of submission to let someone abuse you,” he says in the audio clips. Nonetheless, Andersen finds it telling that the issue of submission always arises in church discussions of domestic violence, “subtly reminding women of their duty to maintain a submissive attitude toward their husbands.”

That this occurs even in Warren’s church, which is derided by more conservative Southern Baptists for its purported cultural liberalism. Andersen sees this as proof of the centrality of male authority throughout mainstream evangelical culture, “which can still be maintained in a controlled separation but is seriously threatened when a woman is given leeway of any kind, for whatever reason, in ceasing to submit to an abusive husband by divorcing him.”

There are more blatant examples of excusing abusive male authority among stricter proponents of complementarianism and submission theology. In June 2007, professor of Christian theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Bruce Ware told a Texas church that women often bring abuse on themselves by refusing to submit. And Debi Pearl, half of a husband-and-wife fundamentalist child-training ministry as well as author of the bestselling submission manual, Created to Be His Help Meet, writes that submission is so essential to God’s plan that it must be followed even to the point of allowing abuse. “When God puts you in subjection to a man whom he knows is going to cause you to suffer,” she writes, “it is with the understanding that you are obeying God by enduring the wrongful suffering.”

While Saddleback’s teachings certainly don’t make such an explicit argument for submitting to violence, and Holladay tells abused women they must seek safety before they attempt to reconcile, there is a similar profession of helplessness before biblical mandates. In the audio clips, Holladay protests he could tell women that there was a third biblical justification for divorce, “a Bible verse that says, ‘If they abuse you in this-and-such kind of way, then you have a right to leave them.’” But ultimately, he says, there’s not, and the question of separation versus divorce comes down to a matter of dealing with the pain of fixing a marriage now or later, almost a matter of discipline.

“It’s not like you can escape the pain,” Holladay explains. “You think you are — there’s an immediate release when you get the divorce.” But the pain abused wives escape through divorce will just be traded for pain down the line as they have to negotiate shared parenting duties with their exes, or encounter “old issues” with a new spouse — a seeming charge that the abused spouse’s “issues” contributed to the abuse. “I’d always rather choose a short-term pain and find God’s solution for a long-term gain, than find a short-term solution that’s going to involve a long-term pain in my life,” Holladay says.

Saddleback’s position is “typical evangelical fare on the subject of domestic abuse and domestic violence,” responds Andersen. Typical because, like other well-known and extremely influential evangelical leaders, Saddleback is pushing a message of “leave while the heat is on,” but only with the intention of returning to the marriage when the violence has cooled. This is the message that Andersen tracks from Christian leaders as prominent as megachurch pastor John MacArthur, Focus on the Family head James Dobson, and established Christian radio psychologists Minirth and Meier on the far-reaching Moody Media empire. “Everyone with a lick of sense knows that, in a violent marriage, the heat is never really off,” Andersen tells me. “Everything can be fine one minute, and the next minute you’re dead.”

In the face of prominent leaders who claim helplessness in the face of biblical tradition, Andersen and a small but growing cadre of like-minded abuse survivors are fighting this established conservative wisdom on domestic violence not with secular or feminist domestic violence tactics, but with new theological arguments arguing for abused wives’ rights within a biblically literalist, and in some cases even complementarian, framework.

While Holladay explains that divorcees will not be turned away from Saddleback, and their divorces will be treated as either any old pre-conversion sin if it happened before they were saved, or forgiven as a repented sin if it happened post-salvation, he nonetheless stresses that mature Christians must admit that their divorce “was more for [their] own selfishness than any other reason.”

For Danni Moss, a pseudonymous blogger and formerly-Baptist abuse survivor, this offer of forgiveness isn’t good enough. “I’m not ok with being accepted because my divorce is in the past, and God accepts and forgives our sins. I didn’t sin in getting a divorce. God directed me.”

Moss’ story of entering and eventually ending an abusive marriage reads like a cautionary tale of the excesses of male headship theology. A daughter of missionaries who followed the popular authoritarian teachings of Bill Gothard, Moss says that her marriage was “arranged” by her father, who believed, as Gothard, that parents know what’s best for their children. Following a popular fundamentalist women’s teaching that love is a choice rather than an emotion, Moss dutifully complied with her father’s choice for her. Hyper-criticism that began on her honeymoon turned into physical abuse when Moss bore the first of her and ex-husband “Gary’s” three children. Sexual assaults and marital rape later became commonplace, as did violence towards both Moss and her eldest two children.

Contrary to Holladay’s limited definition of dangerous abuse, Moss found Gary’s generalized violence, in rages and wall-punching, as damaging as actual beatings. After a particularly intimidating episode, when Gary punched a glass door panel and had to be hospitalized to stop the bleeding of his lacerated arm, Moss left Gary for the first time. “I felt God had shown me that the end of violence was death. I’d kept thinking he would die, but here [with his survival], was this chance that he might not…I realized it would be me if I didn’t get out.”

Moss left Gary twice, but twice was convinced to reconcile with him by their Southern Baptist church, which sent both spouses to marriage counseling, seeking to hear “both sides” of the story. In their focus on reuniting estranged spouses, the counselors gave equal credence to “each side,” equating Gary’s complaints about Moss’s “willful” failures in the kitchen with the physical violence that she and the family endured. Moss believes that the teachings that were common in the SBC and independent Baptist churches that they attended underscored this strategy. “We were taught that women were the completers of men, and that therefore God created Danni for the sole purpose of completing Gary. Since my job was to complete him anywhere he was incomplete, I was supposed to already know what he wanted.” After their first separation and reconciliation, this attitude led Moss to take her children to an outside counselor, so that they could work on “not pushing Gary’s buttons.”

These days, Moss doesn’t attend church — not because she’s opted out or waned in her faith, but because she hasn’t yet found a church where she feels safe to trust the male authority. After Moss finally divorced Gary, a pastor told her she should return to her father’s house so that she could be under the proper protection of male authority. Though Moss didn’t, she doesn’t disagree with the directive on principle: a distinction that is an interesting part of the community of Christian survivors that Moss and Andersen belong to. In this community, which has become more active in the last several years, theologically focused, and often biblically literalist, women are working to reconcile their belief in the literal truth of the Bible with language that has long justified male authority and female subjugation in literalist churches. In their efforts to square biblical literalism with self-preservation, they’re crafting liberation theologies of a sort that do not spring from women’s lib, at least as it’s conventionally understood. (Moss laughingly relates her surprise at being criticized as feminist — a label she doesn’t apply to herself at all.)

In Moss’ case, she argues for a distinction between the language of spiritual authority that she can’t deny is part of the Bible she believes in, and actual practiced authority between husbands and wives, which should not involve power hierarchies. In the meantime, she says that good complementarian marriages might not look any different from egalitarian partnerships — though this common standard of “good intentions,” an echo of traditional complementarian insistences on husbands’ sacrificial headship — leaves little recourse for women who end up the bad sort. In the latter, Moss sees the hand of the original misogynist, Satan, prophesied to have enmity with woman ever since the Fall, who strikes at women outside of male spiritual “covering” through the violence of abusive husbands: a surprising twist of the complementarian insistence that women be protected under the spiritual covering of a man. Reconciling the seeming contradiction between this literalist biblical command and her championship of women’s right to leave abusers, Moss invokes a third way out traditionally reserved for widows. Domestic violence survivors are widows of a sort as well, she says, and so likewise can consider themselves married to God and safe under his protection.

Andersen, who also writes extensively on biblical prophesy, has a different theological explanation, one with a seemingly more feministic bent. The story of the Fall should not be seen as a prescription for marriage roles, she argues, with women charged to follow men as punishment for acting outside the chain of command, but rather as the first chapter in a long history of domestic violence of husband against wife. In Andersen’s reading, the story of Adam and Eve is that of Adam’s deadly betrayal of his wife: offering her up for punishment — the wages of eating the apple were death — rather than owning his blame for sin. Women have been responding in a sort of biblical battered wife syndrome, the “Eve Syndrome,” ever since.

Another of Moss and Andersen’s contemporaries, Barbara Roberts, Australian author of Not Under Bondage: Biblical Divorce for Abuse, Adultery and Desertion, even calls herself a complementarian. Though Roberts believes that complementarianism too often has “an undue emphasis on female submission and too little emphasis on the husband’s duty to protectively lead his wife,” she still agrees with large portions of classic complementarian documents, such as the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood’s Danvers Statement. She holds this belief even as she lays out a theological case for including abuse as one of biblical grounds for divorce: a counterintuitive confluence of ideas, but one which Roberts says is an essential protection for Christian women.

“We know from small studies in Christian contexts, as well as from a great deal of clinical and pastoral experience that domestic abuse is prevalent in Christian contexts,” says Roberts, adding that research has found that Christian women often stay in abusive situations several years longer than secular abused women.

While she sees some churches teaching that “wifely insubmission is the cause of domestic abuse,” as had Bruce Ware, more common is the approach of churches like Saddleback, which allows separation but never divorce for abuse.

“I think Saddleback’s teaching is profoundly and dangerously wrong,” says Roberts, who tried to contact Saddleback twice after the teachings were publicized in early January, offering them her book’s findings that 1 Corinthians 7:15 — a verse commonly interpreted as applying solely to an unbeliever deserting a believing spouse — provides the biblical grounds for abused wives to consider their union nullified. “The key question is not ‘who walked out’ but ‘who caused the separation?’ I believe I have provided a thorough and comprehensive refutation of the view held by people like those at Saddleback.”

Refuting Saddleback’s position on biblical grounds is direly important, says Roberts, to account for the different and additional burdens Christian women experience in weighing whether to leave a marriage. “Devout Christian believers are more intensely bound by their desire to obey God: their very real Savior, who they do not want to displease in any way. Christian victims thus put a positive internal pressure on themselves to ‘stay, submit, pray, forgive, and forget the previous abuse because that would be holding unforgiveness.’” Simply put, Roberts says, “A Bible-believing Christian woman needs a biblical argument for leaving a dangerous marriage because she loves God and wants to obey the Bible…Her scriptural dilemma can only be solved by applying and properly interpreting more scripture to counterbalance and correct her unbalanced emphases and misunderstandings.”

It’s to that end that Roberts and her fellow travelers are amassing a library of resources — novels, personal testimonies, and exegetical material — for women to whom secular reasons for leaving can’t appeal. Perhaps what’s most compelling about the existence of these seemingly contradictory stances on women’s rights, submission, complementarianism, and abuse is the fact that complementarian teachings and domestic violence are both large enough issues within the evangelical church to give birth to such an array of approaches. These including such nascent theological attempts — neither quite feminist nor complementarian — to help give biblically literalist women a safe exit. http://www.alternet.org/story/124174/?page=entire

The Cut Movie Keira Knightley features in a new campaign against domestic violence. The award winning actress made the film with Atonement director Joe Wright to raise awareness for the Women’s Aid charity. The two minute film, ‘CUT’, sees Knightley arrive home after a day’s filming to be confronted by her abusive partner. The film ends with the statement, ‘Isn’t it time someone called cut?’

The campaign will run from today through cinema, TV, print and online. Knightley said: “I wanted to take part in this advert for Women’s Aid because while domestic violence exists in every section of society, we rarely hear about it. We may not think we know someone who has experienced domestic violence, but this does not mean that it is not happening.

You can view the film here too www.thecutmovie.co.uk caution- violent scenes

The Together We Can End Violence Against Women And Girls Strategy consultation sets out action Government has taken to tackle all forms of violence against women and girls. It looks at what more can be done to challenge the attitudes that may uphold it in order to help women and girls feel safer.

To read more: Labout Government

To participate in the consultation 

Donna Intera As part of the support in tackling Domestic Violence in the UK, I have been asked to be a Case Study for the Home Office Awareness Campaign. A press release was issued earlier this month in Norfolk and now talks of participating in a 2-3 minute video for their website and link to Youtube are under discussion.

Having a healthy balanced view of our value, strengths and weaknesses is fundamental to our well being and forming and building healthy relationships. When our self esteem is low, we tend to make choices based on our ‘badness’ rather than what is right and good for us. This is because it is difficult to make healthy decisions when we don’t feel we have a right to anything good because we believe we are ‘not good enough’. Healthy self esteem has nothing to do with our behaviours, abilities or how well we perform a task and is not dependant on our shape, size and appearance. Self esteem is the opinion we have of ourselves deep within our core; it is what we base our self worth on.

As I am a Christian, I build my identity and worth on my faith but for those of you who do not share my beliefs, it is important that you can still recognise your value. Let me ask you a question: How much worth would you place on someone you loved very dearly and how much worth would they place on you? The answer I receive from all my participants is that they are priceless to each other.

I also ask another important question, could you or they be replaced? If I could take you up to the moon for a day or so and try and find someone identical to you on earth, would I find you? The answer is simply no. So in summary, what we have discovered here is that you are a one off rare gem – priceless and unique.

When you know deep inside you have value (and not just on an intellectual level!), it will be easier for you to take care of your needs and deal with those who find it hard to respect you. Instead of feeling guilty and ashamed, you will know that you are entitled to spend some time doing things you love, it’s Ok to meet up with your friends, it is good to take an evening off and it is extremely good for you to be loved in a way that doesn’t hurt.

Written by Joanne Robinson Copyright 2009 Donna Intera

Today, I took a short 30 minute drive to Fakenham, there was not much to see but I found a lovely little hotel coffee shop to take a light lunch break. Seating was tight and I noted a space next to a lady eating alone. I waited to see if she had company and then asked her if I could sit at her table.

Note:

Finding joy in being single and having a full and content life and keep you from choosing Mr Wrong. Have fun and stay safe!

It wasn’t long before we got chatting about city and country life and what we both do for a living. That sparked up a lively conversation about being single and how much fun we were having. We were two kindred spirits that had worked past the fear of eating out alone, and not embarrassed by the stares of couples and groups who thought it odd that we could do such a thing.

It got us talking about society’s expectations about women’s roles and perhaps that of single women, or singles in general. Why do people stare at women who venture out and do something alone? Must we always travel in packs, with children or with a partner at ourside?

We had both decided to go out and enjoy a coffee with some good reading material and from that, two strangers had an enjoyable converstation about our contentment and freedom as singles, plus the added bonus to network.

I have not arrived at being single and doing things with such ease overnight. Six years ago, I attempted to dine alone in the busy city centre of Old Street, London and felt so self concious at the stares of was receiving from couples and singles at the bar, I couldn’t wait to leave. Ok, perhaps a few of those were interested guys but I am sure I would not had sparked so much curiosity if I was seated with someone.

God has taught me to embrace life where I find it. Having moved to Norfolk, I am learning to step out, meet new people and make new friends. I am challenged to see what I can do rather than focus on being afraid to be out here by myself away from all that is familiar to me. In doing so, I am learning that I can do a lot more than I thought I could.

I know many women are bored with their life but are afraid to go out, grab life by the ears and get involved in things they love to do and enjoy themselves. Lack of friends or the want to find a husband before they do anything gives them the horrible lonely feeling of emptiness.

Friendships and husbands don’t get delivered by the postman, they come when we start embracing and enjoying life. God asks as to look at what is in our hand today, so what if it is ‘dinner for one’? Enjoy the meal and look at what you can start doing to make your life more whole and enjoyable, good things happen when you are making the most of what you got!

The film premiers in UK on the 9th February 09, be glad to hear your views and stories!

However, each devotional ends with a series of reflective questions and feedback from readers has been encouraging! Let us pray that the book makes a difference in these women’s lives!

Domestic or spousal abuse is given that name because that is exactly what it is! An abuser has beliefs and attitudes about his intimate relationship that does not hold true for his other relationships. He can be perfectally friendly, tenative, understanding towards his mother or work colleagues then come home and batter his wife for not having the dinner on the table. He can give a perfectly lovely compliment to his mate’s wife and offer to help out at the church then go home and put down and critiize his wife for being an embarrassement and a lazy cow, then pull up his chair and refuse to cook, clean or help out with the kids.

He believes he has CEO status over his wife:

He controls her – it has the right to tell her where she goes and what she does

He is entitled to certain privileages and rights the she is not allowed to have

He thinks he owns her like his possession

So next time you hear a woman say her husband or boyfriend is abusing her and you know him and can’t quite believe he is like that…think again….

Now, 8 years later, I am glad that God took me this way. As I was not brought up in a church system, I have been able to see the church’s response to Domestic Abuse first hand. While I want to be able to shout from the rooftops that we as God’s people can protect the weak and hold the perpetrator responsible, I am sad to say that in my experience, I have seen little evidence of this.

Now, I am not saying that the church does not support the needy, homeless, prostitutes, the youth etc,. The church as a body is going some wonderful work, what I am saying is that there is still along way to go with how we deal with Domestic Violence

Only in that last decade of so has the secular world taken Domestic Violence seriously and I feel that the church response has been even slower. While the church should be at the forefront of addressing oppression and she does a good job of defending the poor, she sometimes is the last to take a stand where domestic violence is concerned. I believe this is because we have feminised the character of God – over emphaising forgiveness and turning the other cheek, while justice and setting a limit around evil is something we are too afraid to act on. I also believe our lack of education about an abuser’s character is another failure and our tendancy to blame the victim for ‘putting up with it’.

Take the woman who goes to her Pastor for help with her abusive husband. If a man is abusing a woman she should not be told to go home, be a good example, pray for her husband and forgive him. Yet because of the misuse of scripture for a woman to submit to her husband, this faulty, dangerous and unscriptual guidance has put many women at danger and sent a message to her husband that its perfectly OK for the church to send back his wife and be mistreated over and over again.

What I find more disturbing is the neutral response a church adopts when faced with abuse. I went through a situation where I started to see controlling tendancies in my boyfriend and after a season of confrontation and trying to sort the issue out, I decided that I had to leave before the behaviour escalated. I thank God that I had grown enough to see the warning signs and leave. Unfortuately, it was when I left the relationship, that my ex-date became very verbally abusive and threatening. It seems he was not too taken with my show of boundaries and responded how abusive people normally do when others say not to their control.

I took the matter to my church and told them about his behaviour, hoping to find protection and support for myself and accountablity for my ex. What I got was a neutral response, here is what I mean:

• We won’t sides: Even though he has been threatening, we won’t take sides as there is always two sides to every story.
• He must be in pain over the split and that is why he is mistreating you
• He needs as much protection from you as you do from him
• We won’t get involved because we want to maintain relationships with him
• We won’t confess he has mistreated you, we will just keep emphasising that he is hurting
• You must have done something to trigger his anger
• We won’t hold him accountable as we don’t want him to feel worse or upset him even further

My bible tells me and my experience of dealing with abuse tells me, that this passive neutral response to abuse does not heal the victim or heal the perpetrator.

A leading Counsellor in this area, Lundy Bancroft, states that when a community does not tolerate abuse, the abuser loses his control. Isn’t this what our God wants us to be, a light in our communities, standing up against evil and holding perpetrators responsbile? The abuser can only find healing by firm confrontation and the abused can only find healing by support and strengthening. That is what our bible teaches but we give the perpetrator our understanding and weak hand and victimize the victim again by telling her she must have done something to be treated that way, which reinforces the abuser’s justifications for his abuse. It tells her she is alone and that there is no one really there to protect her.

I know its not easy to confront evil. We fear losing friends, being made to look the bad person and what others will do and think. Just think about your own life for a second, think about the times you gossiped because you did not want to contront your mate who offended you. Or you withdrew in angry silence and never bothered calling again. Anything but confront. Yet victims of abuse are chastised for not making a stand and then beaten down again because her community won’t stand up and confront with her and for her.

I had to stand against my abuser by myself but I was not alone because I had God with me. He brought several key people into my life that helped me through but the place I expected to help was unable to help me.

If anything, this experience taught me a lot about how our Christian values that were intended to be the moral fibre of our hearts and a firm foundation for our communities can be so distorted and weakened that we give evil power and the power of good is once again seen as the losers team.

It has also taught me how I can educate and support the church in applying wisdom to working with abused women and how to give the perpetrator the best support by taking away his perceived rights to control and own his partner.

Like my inquirers, I once thought that walking the journey to wholeness would eventually ‘reward’ me with a great relationship and without realising it, I felt under pressure from both myself, the media and the women I met, to prove that doing things God way would ultimately reward me and others with marriage.

Fact is, God did not save me for marriage, He saved me because He loved me and wanted me to be free from broken relationships and that is the message He wants all of us to understand. It is a bit like the Spiritual Prosperity message promoted in some denominations, if you are following God you will be blessed in your finances – as long as you pay your tithes and give to the church and if you are struggling there is something wrong with your faith.

Fact is when we do good, we sometimes suffer for it, in fact we are called to suffer for Christ. Jesus said we would have trouble in the world but to be of good cheer for He has overcome it. So while I walk with Christ, I do suffer in my flesh when my longings for a companion are not yet fulfilled. I suffer when I choose to wait rather than choosing a sexual relationship or dating someone or staying with someone that is not right for me. That hurts and I suffer for doing good, yet the rewards from God are far greater. I am blessed for doing things right and I trust God that everything He chooses in my life is for my best.

My last thought on this is that there are lots of safe and fantastic singles who have not been through abusive relationships and haven’t met Mr right. A healthy background doesn’t guarantee a partner, so lets not assume that following the steps I outline in my book, means we will be rewarded with marriage. There are thousands of Christians who haven’t met the right person yet, and even with all my healing and blessed wisdom God has given me to help other women, I too have not met the right person – yet. In fact, all of my dating relationships (and one engagement that didn’t lead to marriage) since I have been saved, God has used to help me grow and learn and become more like His son.

Doing this work has not saved me from disappointment or heart break from a relationship not working out. That is the reality of living in a fallen world and being a woman saved by grace. What it has done is saved me from a life a continued abuse, living without hope, destroying myself and the people around me. It has let me know how loved I am by God, that I have value and something to offer others – a life with God. That has been the rewards, which far out weigh my desires for marriage.