Violence in the Home: Silent Screams

Are evangelicals responding effectively to abused women?

Lonnie Collins Pratt initially was attracted to him because of his strong faith. They married young and attended a charismatic Bible school together. Her husband became a pastor/evangelist and accepted a church position. Their ministry and marriage seemed normal enough, although they did move a dozen times in 14 years.

If they stayed in one place for too long, people began to notice her black eyes and the bruises on her arms and legs. Then they began to ask questions.

Pratt suffered regular beatings from her husband throughout their marriage. The same man who preached from the pulpit slowly isolated her from her family and convinced her that she was worthless. Even though people began to notice the abuse, few knew how to respond. Pratt believed it was her responsibility to make her husband stop, and it was essential to preserve their marriage.

“I really believed that to end the marriage was to end any relationship with God,” says Pratt. When she did seek help from the church, however, Pratt says she did not receive it.

“At one point I had a miscarriage because I had been beaten so badly,” says Pratt. “I went to [another] pastor … who said, ‘Go home and don’t make him do this. How do you make him so angry?’ ”

Pratt finally left her husband when she was diagnosed with cancer and her husband refused to allow her to seek medical treatment. “What he really wanted was for me to die. I decided that even if I had to go against his God, I would live to raise my daughters.”

Abuse in the Christian home

Although Pratt’s story is an extreme example of domestic violence, cases like hers are not uncommon. A 1988 estimate by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) reports that in the United States, 3 million to 4 million women are beaten annually by husbands, former husbands, or boyfriends. Those figures only reflect instances of severe physical assaults that receive medical and police attention. Jeaneen Watkins, a Free Methodist who is a counselor at a domestic-violence crisis agency in Bellevue, Washington, says her agency had 2,659 hot-line calls concerning domestic violence in the first three months of 1993, an 89 percent increase from the same period in 1992.

Pratt survived her abuse and went on to become a successful writer and active church leader. Yet, many women are not as fortunate. Of American women who are killed, two in five are murdered by their husbands. Battery is the leading cause of injury to women—more than rape, accidents, and muggings combined. Battering crosses boundaries of race, class, education—and religious affiliation—according to the NCADV. Among Christians, the problem is complicated by the reluctance that some women would have in seeking help for abuse from a secular agency.

In 1989, InterVarsity Press published Battered into Submission: The Tragedy of Wife Abuse in the Christian Home, by James and Phyllis Alsdurf. According to their research, there are no studies indicating a significant difference in the amount of violence that occurs in religious versus nonreligious homes. Instead, research suggests that the probability of abuse increases with the rigidity of a church’s teachings, especially teachings pertaining to gender roles and hierarchy.

While men are abused in the home, their numbers are much lower. Only 3 to 5 percent of domestic violence victims are men, and the actual amount of physical harm done to men is much lower than that done to women.

In their book, the Alsdurfs addressed specific areas of need within the evangelical community concerning domestic violence, including theological questions about teachings on submission and divorce.

How will churches respond?

In October 1992, the National conference of Catholic Bishops issued a comprehensive statement condemning violence against women. And some evangelical groups have done so as well. Both the Christian Reformed Church and the Church of God (Anderson, Ind.) have conducted studies and passed resolutions condemning domestic violence.

Yet, policy statements have not necessarily translated into specific change in individual churches. “The church isn’t doing anything. What can I say?” says James Alsdurf, who suggests that knowledge of the problem is growing but that the church on the whole is not at the forefront in responding to the needs of abused spouses.

According to two surveys by researchers at the Arizona State University School of Justice Studies, led by John Johnson, many church officials have maintained limited concern about family violence. Of the 300 church officials who responded in 1983 to questionnaires sent to 1,200 Arizona ministers, two-thirds indicated their churches had no specific policy concerning violence within the family. When the study was repeated five years ago, three-fourths indicated their churches had no such policy.

The study’s authors interpret the decrease in the number of policy statements as an indication of ambivalence about violence in the family. Alsdurf says, “Violence is a tremendously frightening and embarrassing thing.… In some ways we want to push it aside.”

Evangelicals and ecumenicals

In May, an international conference in Chicago brought together more than 300 church and organizational leaders to address the problem of family violence. “Called to Make Justice: Religious Communities Working Against Sexual and Domestic Violence” was sponsored by the Center for the Prevention of Sexual and Domestic Violence (CPSDV) and the Commission on Family Ministries and Human Sexuality of the National Council of Churches of Christ.

CPSDV, founded 16 years ago and directed by ethicist Marie Fortune, is a Washington State-based organization that seeks to educate church leaders on sexual and domestic violence. While a handful of evangelicals attended the conference, most were Roman Catholic, Jewish, or from mainline denominations. Conference coordinator Joseph Leonard says, “The people in this conference view this as a political movement in the church, looking at how power is distributed.”

No place in the church?

During the conference, only eight people showed up for a lunch caucus for evangelicals. During the session, several said few evangelical congregations across the country have focused their attention or resources on the problem of domestic violence.

One participant, David Baughman, a counselor at a geriatric center in Chicago, is a rape survivor. Baughman has been ordained in the United Church of Christ and is a lay leader at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois.

“I have concerns within the evangelical church.… One is that I believe that in many evangelical circles … women in general are not heard.”

Baughman believes that often church leaders pay more attention to child abuse than to wife abuse, based on the misconception that women should be able to stop their own abuse. Baughman says that, in some instances, there is a misguided belief that women have brought the abuse on themselves and the abuse would stop if the woman acted more “godly.”

“Child abuse is viewed with the same seriousness, almost, as abortion,” says Baughman. “There is a sense that children need to be protected. Domestic violence grieves God. It needs to be looked at in the same way that we look at abortion.”

Kay Shively, who serves on the board of Women of the Church of God and on the national board for CPSDV, believes evangelicals would be making a mistake to see domestic violence as a “women’s issue.”

“We know that most of abuse perpetrators have been abused,” says Shively. “[T]hese men who are abusing are doing it out of their own abuse.”

Fortune says, “The real irony about what’s happening is that awareness of sexual abuse by clergy came into consciousness in 1985. It’s painful to watch how quickly they’ve responded to that concern, which is their own self-interest, when we’ve been trying for years to get them to help women and children.”

Wide arms of abuse

Not all abuse cases involve violence. The gaining of extreme power and control by one person over another, often through intimidation, is a form of domestic abuse that can be especially difficult to treat. The effects of domestic violence usually ripple through an entire family structure.

A victim of such excessive control, Mary [not her real name] accepted her husband’s emotional abuse for more than 20 years while they were missionaries overseas with an evangelical organization.

Mary had grown up in a Christian home and attended a Bible institute, where she met her husband in the 1950s. She believed he was only acting within his authority when he kept her and their children on an unusually stringent household budget. He periodically pushed or shoved Mary, or blocked her exit or entrance from a room. She was not allowed to leave the bedroom each morning unless she had made the bed and was dressed for the day.

Although he hit her only twice during their marriage, he verbally degraded her and controlled all of her activities. Mary was ordered to post an account on the refrigerator door, detailing the number of cheese slices and glasses of milk her children consumed. No birthday or Christmas presents were permitted.

The likelihood of child abuse is from six to fifteen times higher in homes where the woman is being abused. The abuser of the children is two to three times more likely also to be the abuseing spouse than the battered spouse, according to NCADV.

For nearly a decade, Mary sought individual and marital counseling. No progress was made until she realized her husband’s abusive nature. Today they remain married, even though some abuse continues. Mary has gone on to become an educator and has spoken in public about domestic abuse. Mary says, “It’s not just the women who are suffering, it’s their children.”

Preserving the family

When women turn to the church for help, their desire to keep the family together at all costs is often reinforced. Instead of attending first to the woman’s and children’s safety, the pastor will focus on avoiding a separation. And if the church discourages divorce or separation in all situations, the woman may become trapped in a deadly home.

“When children are involved, moms are just tortured in the sense that they’ve got to keep the family together,” says Watkins.

“One woman basically told me that her options were killing herself or staying and being killed because, if she left him, and since divorce was not a possibility in her beliefs, she would be going to hell. And if she stayed, [she believed] he was going to kill her.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation reports that, in 1991, of the 4,693 female victims of homicide, 847 women were killed by their husbands, 483 were killed by boyfriends, and 236 were killed by a parent.

According to Watkins, pastors and counselors should act with great care in working with domestic-violence cases. Watkins says it is best for counselors to assist victims “in finding options and thinking about options.”

She says, “Anything that helps someone find safety, and [helps] them find out that the church cares … is a huge step toward their healing.”

To act or not to act

The small number of Christian shelters already operating often draw women who would not normally seek help from a secular agency.

Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, operates the largest outpatient clinic that specifically trains students in the field of domestic violence. “[Abused women] come to us recognizing we are a religious institution,” says director Phil Penel. “There are people who just wouldn’t seek services if a program like Fuller’s didn’t exist.”

However, author Alsdurf says it may be appropriate for church leaders to remain cautious before attempting to recraft existing domestic-violence programs. Marie Fortune notes, “This is not something that Christian churches can handle alone.” In some cases, Christians are building bridges with existing agencies.

Hope for change

Domestic-violence agencies are recognizing the need to provide help tailored to the needs of Christians. Watkins has been active in forming support groups in her agency for Christian women who have been abused.

“Often when I ask [abused women], ‘Is the church a resource for you right now?’ and I’m not stacking the question at all, they will burst into tears,” says Watkins. “They love their church and are absolutely tortured over the fact that their church is not there for them.”

The easiest and perhaps most powerful way for the church to show support for battered women is by bringing the subject of abuse into the mainstream. Alsdurf says, “Any time there’s a public declaration by leaders in the church, it’s an improvement. It’s a way to begin to hold yourself accountable. It’s a stimulus to say it’s got to stop.”

By Linda Midgett.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.