Spousal Violence Among World Christians

Silent Scandal

Elizabeth Koepping

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350184190
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350080577
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This book takes a global approach to violence between husbands and wives in faith contexts. Focusing primarily on Christians, the book uses anthropological, theological and historical methods, which intersect with, and are challenged by, lay and ordained women and men from sixteen countries.

Focusing on marital violence, the book explores ways to understand how various churches, their priests, preachers, theologians and members, approach the topic, interpret the texts, and, with often thoughtless complicity, hide from the sin.

Drawing on over a decade researching marital violence in Christian contexts across five continents, Elizabeth Koepping, an anthropologist and priest, presents testimonies from abused women, as well as theological and cultural justifications for spousal abuse employed by perpetrators and bystanders. She argues that if violence against the (female) spouse is understood as proper behaviour by manly men towards unruly wives, Christians may set aside the core text 'Men and women are made in the Image of God', enabling and silently colluding in abuse. The book shows that spousal abuse is an ecumenical phenomenon present all over the inhabited world, and therefore in all Christian churches and indeed other faith traditions.

Part one

The problem

1

‘The glory of God is a human being fully alive’

It is a contention of this book that no human whose body and mind are intentionally and continually damaged by their marital partner can be fully alive, nor live as confident and fruitful a life as their circumstances would otherwise allow. Worldwide, it is women who bear the main burden of such abuse at the hands of their husbands. This is evident not only in current literature but also in the research in the sixteen countries between Trinidad and Tonga via Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia on which this book is based. Yet both men and women collude through silence, whether the silence of the knowing observer or the silence of the complicit institution. Such silence by faith communities supports both abuser and silent bystander, but not the survivor.

Why are the lives of wives less likely to be lived fully, imaging and reflecting God, than that of husbands? Irenaeus wrote 1800 years ago, yet too many lives are still constricted by physical, emotional and other forms of violence, each of which reduces the survivor’s capacity to be fully alive. Physical attacks against husbands certainly do occur, but not as part of a socially acceptable campaign of control and never with the tacit or open support of religious leaders. Families also experience other forms of violence: parents or step-parents against children, adult children against co-dwelling parents, mothers against daughters-in-law were all mentioned during this research. Yet the focus remains physical violence against wives, commonly backed by varying degrees of spiritual abuse (Oakley and Humphreys 2019). This is partly because survivors found punching, kicking and attempted killing easier to talk of than other forms of abuse, and partly because the evidence is less easy for colluders to wriggle around. Cohabiting women suffer similar abuse, which some religious leaders feel morally able to dismiss. However, as no tradition accepts uncontrolled violence aimed at wives by husbands, no priest, imam, rabbi or monk of integrity can ignore wife-abuse.

While not discounting the immediate and long-term effects of violence against husbands and the debilitating shame they may face, this book therefore focuses on attacks by husbands against their wives and the collusion in this by religious authorities and individuals across the world. A handful of vignettes illustrate varied elements: a demanding but fruitful two-day workshop in Pakistan for eighty-five female and male church workers; a lively meeting in Kenya with sixty vocal peasant women with varied views; a long lunch with five German Roman Catholic women, all of whom initially denied knowing any abused women yet each eventually bringing to mind just such a close family member; young Myanmar female and male church workers realizing they too were complicit in silencing women as well as the poor; a group of Tongan men insisting they could beat their wives as Jesus beat the money changers – he didn’t, and they’re not Jesus, but trivialities like that are as nothing when validating abuse. There was the chat on a London train platform with two Californian men who insisted there was no spousal violence in America though ‘a lot’ in the UAE where they worked. ‘Yes,’ they replied to my mentioning such violence in Kentucky (Websdale, 1998), ‘there’s a lot of that in Kentucky, but they’re strange’: the devout Scottish divorcee, dutifully alone for over forty years after her violent marriage ended; the gutsy Trinidadian mother who asked her abusing son to hit her as ‘I too am a wife’; and the Kiribati pastor who apologized to the parents of his two abused daughters-in-law, vowing to protect their daughters in future as if they were his own. So much violence, supported by too much silence.

In recent decades, many legal systems and countries have increasingly prohibited marital violence, with varying success, discussed in Chapter 2. Some regions stress the social and family disruption caused, others the affront to the human rights of each person. Although not the first text on the rights of the individual, the 1948 United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, and subsequent Conventions, supports the view that each person has value. Yet, or because of that last point, the contribution of religion to ending violence against wives is mixed, whether among widely spread Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Daoist, Christian, Muslim, Sikh or more localized traditions.

In the largest tradition, Christianity, high-level deliberations and well-planned programmes of the last forty years may trickle down to regional and local levels, but they might not. Despite sporadic, even heroic, efforts by the few who acknowledge and speak against physical, psychological and emotional abuse in faith contexts, there has been no coherent and effective faith-based opposition to marital violence in this or any other world religion. Such shortfall is unsurprising. All faith traditions interact and are entangled with each context, and usually fail to see the mote in their own contextually embedded eye. Religious practice, irrespective of oral or written tradition as well as of apparently universal religious institutions, occurs at local level. Roman Catholics in Paderborn, Lima, Lagos and Broome carry the same label, but not necessarily the same reason for and view of practice, the same holding for Muslims in Riyadh, Fez and rural Borneo or indeed Buddhists in Kalimantan, New York or Kathmandu.

However, tacit or overt support for wife-abuse by faith traditions, their leaders, congregations and followers is and will increasingly be challenged. As a theologian has bluntly noted, and this includes all major traditions: ‘Premodern religious androcentrism is incompatible with the secular 20th century concept of universal human rights for both sexes’ (Børresen, 2010:259). Faith traditions may not applaud husbands who hit wives willy-nilly, yet their texts are easily misused. This risk can be mitigated, the biblical scholar Fowl suggests, by reading Scripture ‘over against oneself’ (1991:42), maintaining a lively suspicion of a too-ready enthusiasm for a particular tag. Failure to read self-critically supports the culturally biased intentions of any reader, anywhere, even if this opposes fundamental faith themes such as peace, justice, mercy, kindness or love, never mind the near-universal: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’

Buddha, for example, taught, respected and ordained both male and female disciples, yet abused Buddhist women may be encouraged to accept their plight as just desserts for wrongdoing in a previous life. As the Buddhist Khuankaew points out, ‘Just as Christian women are often taught to bear their cross, Buddhist women are taught to accept their karma’ (2007:180). Chapter Four verse 34 of the Qur’an seems to allow a Muslim husband in certain circumstances to beat, tap or leave his wife, following a set sequence of action: yet it may not, as the Addendum makes clear in discussing crucial Buddhist and Muslim texts.

There is no parallel exegesis of Christian texts in this book, because how texts are taught, ignored and used by leaders and followers is embedded in individual and community views. Consequently, actual discussants’ understanding and use of texts they have absorbed are the central interest, rather than exegetical analysis by theologians and biblical scholars, vital though that can be. The question here is: how do people, both those living out their formal training in theology and scripture, and those living out their understanding in life-skills and faith, use the Bible, use a theology, to support or oppose a husband who hits and otherwise abuses his wife?

Let me make a crucial point here. Neither users of nor listeners to a text, irrespective of faithfulness, are necessarily oppressed, wise, nasty, stupid, gullible or hypocritical. Christian women and men who accept that Eve’s taking of the apple in Eden mandates a husband’s rule over them (Genesis 2–3), or that given a husband’s family headship (Ephesians 5.23), wifely obedience (Ephesians 5.22) is due, are not misguided fatalists, even if the outworking of these texts may be illegitimately used to ‘validate’ violence. That is what their background, experience, teaching and milieu tell them and that is how they manage their lives. Christian women and men who reject marital violence, using Genesis 1.27 ‘God made man and woman in God’s image,’ or Ephesians 5.21 ‘Husbands and wives live in mutual submission one with another’, or ‘Husbands do not be harsh to your wives […] so that nothing may hinder your prayers’ (1 Peter 3.7), are by the same token neither automatically wise nor feminist, manipulative nor virtuous. That is what their background, experience, teaching and milieu tell them and that is how they manage their lives. Threads weaving through discussants’ use of texts are drawn together in Chapter 7.

Verses can impact behaviour in the sense of not only explaining it – ‘He hit me because he is “head of the house” and I spoke out of turn’ – but also changing it. Take one verse relevant for Christians, Muslims and Jews: ‘God made man and woman in God’s image’ (Genesis 1.27), of which Goodman wrote, ‘deliberately harming another person desecrates God’s name’ (2003:58). Taught in a confirmation lesson in northern England in 2017, this verse led one older candidate to leave her husband. As she said to her surprised female priest two days after her confirmation: ‘My husband has hit me for the 43 years of our marriage. Now I know I’m made in God’s image and equal to my husband: I’m off.’

Such an assertion of self may evoke the spectre of feminism lurking behind any discussion of marital violence, illustrated in a recent Christian discussion on Eve. The author notes that because of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, partners will battle for supremacy, in a

familiar struggle played out in the ideological conflict between male tyranny (a horrible feature of some cultures and religions) and militant feminism. It doesn’t just happen in the political arena; it is expressed in battles and tensions in countless households. (Paine, 2014:140)

The ordained writer’s moral equivalence between ‘male tyranny’ over wives and an unexplained ‘militant feminism’ exemplifies the illogicality endemic in this area. Male household tyranny, Paine seems to imply, is a feature neither of his religious tradition, Christian, nor of his country, Britain, a view readily disputed by abused Christian British wives. Such buck-passing is the key for all people, of no faith and of any faith, to ignore the issue for a quiet conscience and an easy life. That this contributes to violence against actual women is as easily dismissed as their pain, and others’ shame, is trivialized.

Irrespective of brand, actual Christians working for or worshipping in local churches and too many seminaries have, with the odd exception, ignored wife-abuse, or at best responded to it in terms of ‘being kind to the weak and troubled’. This may help individual abused women find a roof. However, if it enables implicit and explicit support for marital violence to continue unchallenged, such tinkering at the edges is theologically and morally barren. Churches benefit from the topic being ‘unsuitable for a pleasant chat by nice people’. Leaders of churches can and do say that because no Bible verse opposed the beating or otherwise abusing of wives in those words, it is not a subject for sermons. Religiously oriented survivors of abuse, just as others, may prefer to ‘forget’ it, the better to get through the day. Abused people commonly internalize blame, accepting their tormentor’s scathing views and their own part in ‘causing’ the violence. However, a faith survivor may add a salvific slant, believing her ‘supposed sin’ counts against her, rather than the actual sin of the white-washed assailant counting against him. This assumption is underwritten by much church teaching past and present.

Both Christian women in general and victims and survivors in particular talk about it far less than might be imagined. (Both ‘victim’ and ‘survivor’ are used in this book: if the abused woman feels herself a victim, at that point she is one. She may eventually feel herself a survivor, after or during the period in which violence is an ever-present possibility. However, using only survivor to stress female agency is unacceptable.) To give an example of silence from this research, a female hospital counsellor who had arranged a talk for me in a South Indian Christian city hospital asked the nurses the next day how they had found it. She reported:

They wanted to hear more about it. I asked why they hadn’t said much when questions began. They said, ‘We didn’t know what to say because we’d never heard anything like that before and we were shocked.’ Most came from small villages, where ‘no one ever talks about such things’.

She attributed silence to the nurses’ rural background. Yet just two days later in that same large city, she attended a small evening meeting of high-caste female church friends to discuss the issue. As we departed, she commented to full agreement from the other women: ‘We’ve known each other for years, but we’ve never talked about this before. We always talk with a certain reserve, and we’re very careful not to go over boundaries.’

Nor is it a richer world-poorer world split. A group of women in Scotland had that same response: ‘Keep quiet, keep any problems under wraps, get by.’ Villagers in northern England did speak up, albeit rather late in the day:

As the widow followed the coffin of her late husband out of the church, the congregation began to applaud, tentatively at first and then with increasing conviction. The widow having survived forty-six years of an abusive marriage in quiet submission, villagers were expressing their solidarity with her. Her closest friend described the event as the village ‘telling her that they stood by her all those years, that they knew and that they saw it all, and that they’d cared all along.’

By ‘seeing’, the speaker meant understand rather than see the violence, the ‘privacy of the family’ enabling silence to be the cowardly choice for observers as well as the rational choice for abused women who fear further retaliation and lack family and church support.

Much the same ignoring or silencing of the issue applies to other faith traditions. Individual pastors, imams, rabbis and priests do quietly oppose marital violence, do say the right thing, do offer real support, as do the laity. Yet faith circles rarely mention it in teaching or preaching and then usually as a potential pastoral problem or irritation, yet another sign of human failure due to Adam and Eve, the rebellious nature of women, failings in a previous life or the failure of feminist-influenced wives to refrain from that rebellion which merits chastisement. Overall, the issue seems at best an optional single-lecture add-on in the already lowly esteemed practical theology training of religious leaders. Yet it is there, where church leaders are trained, where survivors’ voices should be heard, and there where sloppy Bible-reading and sin-supporting theology should be challenged.

But it is not just faith traditions which sidle around the issue. An anthropology volume on domestic violence planned in the mid-1980s and first published in 1992 (Counts, Brown and Campbell) noted that some anthropologists failed to contribute a chapter lest they ‘expose the dark side of a culture’: others felt that publishing on it might preclude their gaining entry to continue research or that writing about it meant imposing a political agenda from outside. One man felt domestic violence should not be examined ‘lest it encourage women to protest traditional gender roles and destabilise family life’ (1999:xviii).

The impact of violence within a marital relationship is not restricted to wives and mothers: children suffer too.

It is very painful for children to watch their dad beating their mother. I [female] used to plead with dad to stop. His behaviour discouraged me from marriage. I love him very much, but what he used to do to my mum keeps haunting me (Kenya).

On bad nights, she’d bring her kids to her father’s house to sleep or to my [male] porch so they were safe. The abuse was so bad she had to leave lest she died. The second daughter killed herself when she was twenty. There were many scars on the children (Trinidad).

The school children (aged nine) don’t say much when I [female] teach the ten commandments until we get to marriage and adultery. Then they talk about the fighting and hitting between their parents, most saying they should split rather than fight (Germany).

The son of a man who hit both his wife and his children said: ‘I didn’t go to church on Father’s Day for years because I just couldn’t face the memories of his violence.’ Replication by imitation may affect the sons of an abuser, both those who abuse their wives and those who are crippled by the fear that they might: ‘My father hit my mother. I was so afraid I’d hit my wife that in a dispute I was paralysed, backing off.’ Some hold off or do not marry at all, explaining, ‘I’m too scared to marry in case I also hit my wife.’ Others avoid such unappealing options in a mutually happy married life.

Such anxiety that a marriage of people with direct or indirect experience of abuse would be negatively affected by an inability to negotiate a full and balanced relationship came up again and again. Anxiety also affects daughters who marry late in the hope of avoiding an abuser or, marrying early to avoid home violence, are chosen by men who pick out vulnerable women. These are not women who want to be beaten. To daughters of violence, such men may represent normality, the intermittent sweetness of their abusive father being part of the cycle of violence. With no peaceful family to return to, their future can be bleak and lonely.

Children may deal with their faith tradition’s tacit support for violence by leaving the church themselves, as a German woman explained:

My stepfather hit my mum a lot back in St Lucia. The pastor said ‘pray, persevere, be patient and God will deal wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1: The problem
• Part 2: Views from the field
• Part 3: Threads to a conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint