I’m currently reading Kathryn Joyce’s book Quiverfull, which is scheduled to come out next month, and I’ve been enjoying the articles she’s been publishing to promote the book. She’s got one up at Alternet today about one of the worst aspects of the Christian patriarchy movement—-if you tell women to submit, even if you deny that it’s true, you’re encouraging wife battering. The dirty little secret of evangelical tolerance of wife battering is that it’s not a problem for just a slim minority of super crazies, but is in fact part of the mainstream evangelical movement, basically any church or belief system that’s invested in male dominance and bleats about “family values”. Yes, that includes Rick Warren, who teaches that battered women have no right to divorce their abusers.
After years of pressure from anti-feminist forces, we as a culture have gotten into the habit of pretending that domestic violence—-while wrong—-is an individual problem instead of the logical result of a patriarchal culture. At best, I think most people believe that most abusive partners are men because we slip into essentialist thinking about how men are just more violent. At worst, there’s the percentage of people who just deny that there’s a real problem, and pretend that abuse is about equally powerful people tussling with each other. However we see it, we refuse to see how much domestic violence is directly linked to male dominance—-abusers are often (usually?) men who, on one level or another, buy into the idea that they are superior to women and feel entitled when they hit or otherwise force submission. When you see domestic violence in the more individualized way, though, I think it’s easier to lull yourself into believing that couples that are torn up about it can fix their relationships up with therapy. This sort of thinking dominates the evangelical movement, for instance. Saddleback “allows” abuse victims to sleep elsewhere when their husbands are in a beating mood, but demand that the women return as soon as things have cooled down, to try to make it work.
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.”