7 Ways Churches Can Address Emotional Abuse in Christian Marriages

Summary: This article gives 7 ways churches—especially Evangelical churches—can address emotional abuse in Christian marriages better. Then this article documents 7 problems and gives 7 solutions for pastors, church staff, and lay leaders. Here is the 20-min. video version on YouTube.

About Me: I’ve been a Christian divorce recovery leader in conservative churches since 1998. For more than 20 years I’ve spent hours listening to horrible stories of abuse and betrayal. I believe in the sanctity of marriage. God meant marriage to be loving, undefiled, and lifelong. But what happens when it’s the opposite? What if it’s not just unloving, it’s destructive, even dangerous?

7 WAYS CHURCHES CAN GET BETTER
ABOUT HANDLING EMOTIONAL ABUSE VICTIMS

• 1. Learn to identify emotional abuse tactics. Many tactics are insidious and destructive yet difficult for outsiders to detect. Although some people may not take emotional abuse seriously, the legal world does. "Coercive control" is illegal in England, Scotland, Ireland, France, and Wales and in many U.S. states. Some emotional abuse falls within criminal definitions of threats (extortion), bribery, blackmail, perjury, harassment, and defamation. Read this list of 130 common examples of abuse.  www.lifesavingdivorce.com/130examples
• 2. Help your staff create a plan when you hear about emotional abuse. Educate them about the realities of abuse in Christian homes. Even the most conservative family researchers writing for the pro-marriage Institute for Family Studies have found than 1-in-4 highly religious marriages in the U.S. have experienced abuse (page 31). Hold a basic Domestic Violence 101 training for church staff and volunteers. Pastor Neil Schori's 1-hour video training is free: www.lifesavingdivorce.com/DVOctober
• 3. Understand that abuse victims don't always know they are being abused. They may even deny being abused, even if they are being battered. Show them the Duluth Wheel of Power and Control, a circular diagram available free online that describes 8 categories of abuse and give examples.
• 4. Investigate the Bible passages about abuse and divorce www.LifeSavingDivorce.com/abuse-in-bible
• 5. Reframe Malachi 2:16 in your sermons. For the majority of biblical and church history, Malachi 2:16 was not translated as "God hates divorce" or "I hate divorce." It was written more than 2,400 years ago. For the first 2,100 years, it was interpreted as an anti-abuse or anti-treachery verse, rather than an anti-divorce verse. Then, starting for the first time with the King James Version, for 385 years, it was interpreted as "God hates divorce." Now the new modern translations published since 1996 (after the Dead Sea scroll fragment of Malachi 2:16 was published) have gone back to the interpretation used prior to 1611 and the KJV. The NIV 2011, ESV, and CSB do not interpret it as "God hates divorce."  Graphic: Malachi Time Line:  www.LifeSavingDivorce.com/malachitimeline  To see major Bible translations for the past 2,400 years, click www.lifesavingdivorce.com/malachi
• 6. Include in sermons that emotional abuse is real, give examples and tell victims it isn't right. Empower them to speak up. See www.LifeSavingDivorce.com/130examples
• 7. Publicly admit that some divorce is justified and godly. It's God's rescue plan to save the lives of parents and children. To defend this viewpoint, refer to the findings in the Harvard Quarterly Journal of Economics that found that in states that passed unilateral no-fault divorce in the 1970s and 1980s,  the suicide rate for wives dropped 8-16%. The domestic violence rate by and against both men and women dropped 30%. The homicide rate of women murdered by an intimate dropped 10%. (Source: Stevenson and Wolfers, “Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: Divorce Laws and Family Distress,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics (Feb. 2006).)

NEXT STEP

LEARN MORE; GO BEHIND THE SCENES: Why are Abused Christians Leaving the Church? To Avoid the Divorce Stigma

Twenty-five years ago, I was a young divorced mother in the mega-church I had attended since childhood. I knew perhaps a dozen people who had ever gone through a divorce, despite the fact that 1-in-4 conservative Christians have ever divorced according to Barna Group. In a church of more than 2,000 adults, demographers would have expected about 500 divorcees. But I didn't see them.  I had been attending that church for nearly 30 years but only knew a handful of members who had ever divorced. They either weren't there, or they were hiding, trying to avoid the stigma. Now I believe many had left and gone elsewhere. LifeWay reports that 1 in 5 Christian divorcees leave the church and about half switch churches. Christianity Today reports a huge drop-off of Evangelical divorcee attendance—perhaps 1 in 3—far worse than other kinds of churches see. Evangelical divorcees leave, but not necessarily because they've rejected their faith. Many still love the Lord, and identify as Evangelicals, but don’t feel accepted and valued in the church. (See graph below, from the Christianity Today article.)  Thousands have found faith communities in secret online support groups on Facebook and elsewhere.