*trigger alert*
When I first heard Janet Levinson from the Protective Mother's Alliance speak for the first time, I had no idea what was coming. I sat near the front, and I remember wishing later that I'd hidden somewhere in the back of the crowd. Tears streamed down my face throughout her entire presentation. Why, you many wonder? Her talk reminded me of the plight of many wives mothers I've come to know... in the churches I've attended. When churches dehumanize and vilify women, for several reasons, the family dog often gets higher esteem.
Secrets About Domestic Abuse Under
Gender Hierarchy
The Shepherding
Discipleship Movement church I attended in the Nineties followed
the dynamics described in this
recent post. Abused women who attended there were called to let
“ooey gooey love
cover” their husbands' sins against them because of gender
hierarchy. (Of course, at the time, I had no clue that there was
such a thing as a “Shepherding Movement,” nor that domestic
violence was tolerated within it.) These types of churches view a
woman's lack of complete and unqualified submission as the
source of all family conflict, treating it as an unpardonable sin.
When I say that the church expected wives to “cover” her
husband's sins, those sins notably included domestic violence,
adultery, and pornography.
Suffering
unjustly through submission at the hands of an unjust authority
was taught as a virtue that imparted spiritual
power and shaped character. Resistance to the hierarchy,
God's primary tool for sanctifying the Believer (the process of
transformation to make them ever more what God wants them to be), was
deemed to be an act of direct rebellion against God Himself. If
someone was harmed in this process, they were celebrated as a the
greatest of martyrs for the cause of submission. I'm sure that Paige
Patterson would agree (partial
transcript/context and audio).
Dr. Dorothy Patterson, Paige's wife, also tells other wives
that they
are not liable for wrongdoing if they go along with the errors of
their husbands, so long as they submitting.
I would eventually learn that the whole
network of churches had what they believed was a foolproof backup
plan for enforcing wives' submission as well. Though not often, they
would file reports with the local child protective service (CPS),
falsely claiming that these mothers were abusive to their children.
They also occasionally relied on the principle of hierarchy to coach
a non-compliant mother's children to “advocate” for and obey the
father only by offering crafted statements to CPS investigators.
“Father knows best.” It became part of a foolproof plan
to make a woman compliant. When the few women managed to go to
family court to seek separation from abusive husbands, those CPS
reports were enough to stigmatize and blacklist them from gaining
custody of their children, even if they were never found guilty of
endangering their little ones. If they wanted continued access to
their children, they knew that they would have to do whatever their
husband and the church required of them. The truly “rebellious”
woman would get the double whammy of both a false CPS report and
the swearing out of a fictitious mental health/medical warrant which
falsely claimed that mom posed physical harm to herself and/or
others.
During those years when I attended,
these families would be assigned to the same home group (midweek cell
groups for Bible study), a group that I ended up calling the
“wife-beater's home group.” I was reprimanded for my comments
and for “gossiping” with the wives who attended – women who
came to me for support in the midst of confusion. It made no sense
to them that no restrictions were put on their husband while so much
more was required of them, all accompanied with attitudes of blame
for their husband's actions along with a disturbing lack of empathy
or concern for their pain.
When I was confronted by church
leadership for listening to these women, I was told that they were
rebellious, dangerous, and unreliable. I was instructed to stay far
away from them. When asked who had knowledge of these matters, I
explained that I'd told my husband what other women had shared with
me. I was then told that I “shouldn't discuss everything” with
him.
I learned that a few active
deacons attended the wife-beater's home group. (Yes, these
abusive men were permitted to keep their positions of leadership
within the church while their families were being “counseled”
because the wife was seen as the cause of her husband's aggression
over which he became helpless.)
I was told by one of these wives that the group leader himself would
discuss his personal struggle with his own urges to refrain from
physically abusing his own wife. For women, the declared panacea for
domestic abuse and the stabilization of these troubled marriages was
a wife's unqualified, unquestioned submission to her husband.
Providing creative, readily available sex to their husbands was also
recommended to these wives as an appeasement which I criticized as an
escapist “sex therapy” (like an addict used substances to avoid
attending to their feelings of toxic shame).
I
suspect that Bruce
Ware might agree with this perception and strategy (read more
HERE
and HERE
with the original audio HERE).
The Mahaney's also seem to share
this outlook, too. It seems that outside of the circles of
Shepherding, men have two options when their wives don't submit to
them. They can take the passive role which is feminine, the
unthinkably sinful choice. The aggressive role which results in
abuse seems to be the masculine choice and can be seen as somewhat
understandable (that first step toward justification). What good man
will choose the passive option when he, as a husband, becomes
overwhelmed with his wife's “sin” against him through her failure
to submit? For one couple in our church, buying the wrong kind of
toilet paper was a marital issue. And while on the phone with women
at the church, more than once, I've heard husband's raise their
voices to say “Woman!” and “Submit to me!” as they commanded
their wives.No Informed Consent
Of
course, I didn't find out about this dirty little secret until I'd attended
that church for three years. When we first joined, we attended three
evenings of membership classes, and no one told us that the church
required members to accept this unjust suffering imperative as a
spiritual virtue – a way of earning additional favor with God and
spiritual power through “learning humility” to build character.
They didn't tell us that they held to gender hierarchy, as those
lessons were only learned through punishment after violation of these
mystery rules. They certainly didn't tell us that they had a “wife
beater's home group” that taught wives to forgo
justice and their own safety in the process. They didn't give us
informed consent that people in the church called CPS on rare
occasion to falsely report a mother as an alleged child abuser. They
did not tell us that if we women ever needed an advocate in family
court that church leaders would usually show up only to support men.
They were too busy love
bombing us at that point, the tactic that they used during the
seductive phase of the cycle
of abuse during the recruitment process.
When I first heard
about the problem of domestic violence in my church – the first
incidence to come to my attention – I was willing to believe it.
During my first year at the church, I worked on a collaborative
project with the abused woman's husband. He quite unexpectedly raged
at me, fists clenched with a face redder than red, and I felt like he
mustered what little available strength he'd not devoted to anger to
refrain from attacking me. I was shocked that the other people in
the room didn't hold him accountable for this aggression. I didn't
learn until some time later that, though my actions were not
unreasonable and they agreed with the point I'd made which provoked
the angry man, some of those in the room believed that I deserved the
rage for another reason. I'd failed to publicly submit to this man's
whims, agreeing to the error, merely because of gender hierarchy
rules at the church. A woman never openly confronted a man, and
certainly not publicly, as it might be seen as “speaking into his
life,” a cult-speak phrase with ambiguous meaning that was used
there.
Submission
to hierarchy trumped any wrongdoing, though I did not yet fully
understand that element of the group's unspoken rules of conduct.
Recalling this event that occurred over the planning of music for a
church service, I could only imagine what the church required of this
man's wife at home. Indeed, these unspoken rules of conduct or the
“hidden
curriculum” can be far more powerful standards for how a church
is governed than are any guideline found in a formally
written doctrinal statement.
My Undeniable Wake Up Call
K and I were friendly, and I'd attended
classes of hers at the church. She was a wonderfully dynamic and
interesting person, not really the sort that the church preferred. I
remember when we bought our first house, she gave me a flat of
flowers that she'd grown from seed herself. One Monday morning when
filling in for the church secretary in the pastor's office, into the
fourth year of my attendance at the church, I received a call from K.
She sounded quite frantic. I'd arrived before the pastor, so I
tried to get some information from her, concerned because she was in
such distress. Even after the pastor arrived, she called several
more times that morning but would not share with me why she sounded
so upset and with such a sense of urgency.
When the pastor told me that he was
going to a local eatery for lunch and that he would soon return, I
was concerned that she would call again. I asked my pastor whom I
saw then as my trusted friend if it would be inappropriate for me to
inquire about what was going on with K. He very glibly said,
standing there in a plaid shirt and khaki pants as he made his way
down the hall and to the door, “Ah, she's alright. (scoff) She
said B locked her in the basement.”
Here's
what I recall about my thought processes as I tried to make sense of
things. Okay... A whole lot
doesn't make sense, particularly the casual way the pastor has just
related this really horrible, horrible thing to me. My heart starts
to race, but I feel pulled out of the appropriate passage of time.
Processing, processing... B had apparently shoved his
wife down the stairs into the basement of their very nice little
country home and locked the door. I'd visited their home before. I
knew where the basement door was. My mind, seeming somewhat apart
from me, quickly considers that she has boys that are young enough to
still need supervision and homeschooling, and her husband worked
during the day. Thinking... Thinking...
This must
have happened yesterday. (I'm
experiencing cognitive
dissonance at its finest. The pastor's words and his detatched
attitude didn't match his actions which didn't match his responses
which didn't match the situation. And none of any of that matched
what I would do if anyone were trapped in a basement.)
My brain is still frantically racing,
trying to make sense of things, as though the world is also moving in
slow motion around me. K's calling here, so she is able to get to a
phone and could call anyone. If someone had shoved me down stairs
and locked me in a basement, and I had a phone, I would immediately
call the police. Whoever had done this to me would probably regret
the day that they were born for a little while. I would make sure
I'd done all that I could do so that they could never do such a thing
to me or anyone else again. The pastor had not run to her aid and
wasn't planning on going. This surely must mean that this happened
on Sunday, and assuming that she'd been liberated and thus had access
to a phone, she very likely waited all night to call the pastor in
the office for moral support. That's why she must have called so
early in the morning, before he even arrived.
But nothing about how he responded made any sense. I
stood there in shock as the pastor left, wondering why he didn't
express concern or distress and had so glibly referred to what had to
be yesterday's terribly threatening events. Why didn't he go to her
to comfort her? Why didn't he at least invite her to come to the church if he couldn't go to her,
if only to have someone let her know that they cared about her?
I learned a couple of weeks later from
K, after she was granted an exparte because of escalating
problems, that when I spoke to her on that Monday morning, she wasn't
calling about past events. She had access to the phone in their
basement and was calling from her confinement. She didn't call the
police. I didn't know then that the church unofficially recommended
through an unwritten code that good, submissive wives were expected
to turn to the church for this kind of help. Calling the police
would slander her husband and threaten his reputation. K followed
church procedure when she called the pastor.
Again, I scramble to make sense out of
these nonsensical actions to exonerate the pastor. I suppose that K
had followed chain of command and called her home group leader
“covering” first, but perhaps couldn't get him on the phone, so
she called the pastor instead. I remember wondering if this might
explain why the pastor didn't immediately rush over to the home to
help her – because she'd failed to follow “chain of command”
through her home group. If you don't attend a home group, you can't
have access to the pastor, essentially I'd recently learned that
this was a rule that seemed new to me, even though we'd attended for
some time. What a crazy thought to have! . . .but I recently
learned that the pastors would often not receive someone if they had
not discussed a matter with their home group leader first. I thought
that when the pastors did this, they were just setting limits with
people who failed to show respect for their time and were abusing
privilege. Why else would you turn a person in distress away? Upon
learning that I'd talked to K while she was confined, I was mortified
and stood paralyzed, unable to speak. I didn't know what to say. I
was angry, but I was so confused. How could I let myself believe
that this had been a past event.
I eventually went back to K and
repented to her. I was so sorry. I explained that because of the
pastor's responses and the manner in which he'd told me about things,
I found the idea that she was in active distress unthinkable. Who
would not intervene on her behalf? I had only really just begun to
see how the hierarchy requirement which required submission of women
drastically affected how women were esteemed – and how I'd condoned
this attitude and the serious consequences that resulted. I told her
that if I had known the true nature of her circumstances that
morning, I would have arrived at her house immediately, with an axe
and the police. Her boys were upstairs, unattended. She was alone
in the basement, after the additional trauma of having her husband
push her down the stairs, at least enough to shut and lock the door.
I was even more mortified that it took
me so long to tell her that I would have been there for her, with an
axe and the police. I was so dumfounded under the effects of the
church's system of mind control that I didn't even find a way to tell
her how sorry I was immediately. I'd been manipulated into accepting
the idea that God required gender hierarchy to protect women. But
contrary to what was said about it, all of the evidence that I could
see demonstrated that the intense focus on hierarchy and all that was
done to enforce it proved to work quite the opposite. It was
actually used to justify the abuse of women. Leaders did nothing but
run around like policemen who try to disperse a crowd by saying,
“Move along, folks. There's nothing to see here.”
Uhh. No.
Ideas Have Consequences
Studies have shown the power that an
authority figure representing a system that is believed to serve the
greater good holds over people, most notably in the Milgram
Study. Bandura's studies concerning moral
disengagement show that when investigators prejudice and prime
people, telling them that the other test subjects are beneath them or
are “like animals,” the amount of punishment that individuals are
willing to execute increases in intensity and duration. (Note that
these studies all claimed to be advancing science for the common good.)
Though many sources point it out, one I've reported on
this blog discusses how dehumanizing the foe during times of war
enables people to justify and then commit greater acts of aggression
in order to win for the “just cause.” Hannah Arent also explains the same in
her book, The
Origins of Totalitarianism,
adding in the additional motivators of blame, greed, and power which
can also be used to justify aggression and dehumanizing behavior.
For example, in the early days preceding World War II, people became
willing to wink at the horrors of the Holocaust because they were
jealous about the financial success of the Jewish Rothchilds who had
governed much of the wealth of Europe. Human
beings have an innate sense of justice, if only for their own “just”
benefit of self-interest. Human beings are also very willing to
relinquish moral responsibility to an authority if they represent an
an idealistic cause, no matter how misguided.
When men like Bruce
Ware teach that women are merely the derivative image of God and
are only the indirect image of God, it plays upon these same
principles. When men like John
Piper claim that a regenerate Christian wife's nature helplessly
drives her to overthrow and dominate their husband's position,
wellbeing, and person, it sets up a false dilemma. It pits man
against woman and renders that woman immoral due to her very essence.
(How do men who believe this close their eyes in bed at night
while laying next to their natural enemy?) Piper then heaps
additional blame for sin on Eve by holding her accountable for
original sin that exceeds Adam's, but then claims that Adam was only
punished for her because a woman is said to be something of a hapless
simpleton who can't even answer for her own mistakes. All women are
then said to be prone to deception and more readily given over to sin
than a man, requiring a paternal influence to help them if then want
to live effective Christian lives. They can't
even share the Gospel effectively, according to MacArthur's
view. When Michael
and Debi Pearl teach that infants are diabolical tyrants who seek
to confound and control their parents, their ideas also prime their
followers for tragic behavior.
Why would a poorly esteemed woman who
is said to have a subordinate essence and an inferior moral
capability be treated any differently than the Jews were under the
Third Reich? The subjects in the Milgram experiment were told that
they were helping to further research that would ultimately enhance a
person's ability to learn, and they operated under the assumption
than the other test subjects were good, decent people. They weren't
working justice against an adversary. Better than sixty percent of
participants were willing to shock the test subjects to the point of
unconsciousness and with what they believed to be dangerous levels of
voltage. In the Bandura study, the students who believed that they
were delivering electrical shocks to other rude, “animal”
students were more aggressive and generous with punishment.
Would a husband likewise not also be
more willing and even feel a duty to punish a wife who was always
“out to get him?” And what if he's taught that the Bible teaches
that women are the root cause of sin from the beginning because of
their inferiority and their inherent moral lack? They're dependent
upon men to correct them and look to men for help to do what they
cannot do on their own? Consider also the subtle impact of watching
his pastor lay all of the fault on the head of his wife for a
troubled marriage. Why would he not feel aggression? The primary
beliefs about what a woman and a wife are define her as evil and
something less than human.
How should a rational person respond to
an adversary? When complementarianism dehumanizes, objectifies,
scapegoats, and vilifies women, why should we not expect to see the
tolerance and justification of domestic abuse? Isn't it the logical
conclusion? Isn't it understandable? Is it not a matter of survival
and good reasoning to hold an inferior adversary at arm's length? If
a woman is basically worthy of blame and given to rebellion, doesn't
abuse seem to be a foregone conclusion?
If a woman is something less in essence
and virtue than a man, doesn't the tendency responsible for the
expression “kick the dog” seem likely? Woman is said to be of
lesser essence than the man, and so is the humble, faithful dog. But
it seems to me that the family dog is likely esteemed with more
virtue in a complementarian home that exposes these ideas. The dog
is man's best friend, not his greatest adversary. And the family dog
is not the source of original sin.
Is it any wonder that so many people –
and so many churches – use complementarianism to justify domestic
violence? I'd rather be a complementarian family's dog than its
beleaguered wife.
Great blogs that focus on domestic violence in Christian settings:
- A Cry for Justice
- Submission Tyranny in Church and Society
- Emotional Abuse and Your Faith
- Woman Submit!
- Not Under Bondage
- Because it Matters
And don't forget to visit the FreeCWC Playlist concerning Domestic Violence
(I was half punch drunk silly from editing videos when I put together this clip about the complementarian dogs barking. I was inspired by Shirley Taylor's blog post wherein she makes the statement. Watching it today, after over two years of thinking little about it, I wept. I meant to bring a bit of levity to a terrible topic, but the sad fact remains that women and children suffer under these ideologies. People may believe that these systems help them honor and obey God's Word. I think that they violate the Word, twisting it into the traditions of men for the purposes of manipulation and control. They use the sweet Word of God to tread upon the weak. None of any of this is a laughing matter. Quite the opposite.)
