In his opinion piece published yesterday on Eternity online, Karl Faase is responding to Julia Baird’s rather unhelpful article that unfairly targets Christians and the Bible’s teachings. Baird linked Rosie Batty’s situation to the Biblical understanding of submission and concludes this teaching leads to domestic violence. In doing so, she committed a logical fallacy and then pushed it a little too far. Having said that, I believe she made a fair point, unfairly.

Karl Faase also commits a logical fallacy: that, because he has not seen it, or he does not know of instances, therefore it does not exist, or is not happening. He also cites no experts in the field of Christian counselling, chaplaincy, or psychology for his opinions, yet he takes the high ground of his 30 years of ministry experience to dismiss what may be very well valid claims.

Knowing what we do about hidden child sexual abuse and the use of alcohol, prescribed pain medication and pornography within the church, it is simply not statistically possible that we do not also have a problem with domestic abuse.

True, we mightn’t see many women with broken noses and cheek bones, but we definitely have women whose husbands take their shoes or car keys with them when they go out so that their wife can’t leave the home, women who are denigrated because they do not live up to their husband’s pornographic ideals, women married to men in a continual state of rage, women who have no money to spend or no time that their husband does not control, or families who tip toe around a ‘difficult’ father that no-one dares to upset!

Sin is alive and well in many theologically conservative households and submission in the wrong hands does lead to abuse, usually in the form of control and emotional abuse. One way in which sin plays out, is that some men leverage the scriptural injunctions of submission by bending these verses towards meeting their own unmet needs, rather than seeking to love and serve their wife sacrificially.

People think they can’t see any examples of this abuse yet we all know of people who say, ‘My mother was a ‘patient’ woman, my father was a rather ‘difficult’ man’. What they are reflecting or witnessing to is a form of emotional abuse. These are forms of coded language indicating common forms of abuse are accepted as unpleasant but normal. The woman has not been cared for cherished and loved as would be reasonably expected for a wife.

We need to be concerned if we notice a woman is visibly afraid of being late, keeping her husband waiting or disobeying him in some other way. We also need to be aware of emotional abuse that chips away at a person’s feelings of self-worth and independence. The abuse may take the form in which being like-minded is interpreted as thinking ‘exactly the same’ on everything, allowing no dissent on opinions about religion, cultural beliefs, family life, values or politics.

These are strong indicators that all may not be OK, and if at all possible we need to help the victim seek professional support.

For further reflections on domestic violence in the church, you might like to read this piece by Amelia Schwarze, published a few years ago, but just as relevant as ever. “If you are the minister of a Church and you have a hundred couples in your congregation, the numbers suggest that somewhere between two and eight of those couples have a relationship that could be described as abusive.” – See more here.

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