(Background: Here are two letters from devout Christian wives who were abuse victims. Brenda L. gave me permission to share her notes publicly. When she went to her former pastor and church leaders for support and empathy during her abusive marriage, she was met with threat of excommunication if she divorced. Her church also sided with her husband and helped him try to block her in court. I wish this was rare, but it is not. Many Evangelical denominations don’t believe in divorce for abuse. And some denominations include excommunication in their public policy on divorce. It’s such a big problem that many abused wives have shared their stories publicly about excommunication, and turned it into a ministry. Since then Brenda left that church, and has found a wonderful church.)
What a lot of pastors don’t understand about domestic abuse in “Christian’ marriage” is that by a certain point, we’ve already been through hell.
Threatening us with hell doesn’t have a lot of leverage after that.
—
We have already lost everything.
Threatening us with loss doesn’t intimidate us as much after that.
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We have already been betrayed and abandoned.
Excommunication doesn’t look much worse after that.
—
The more we have lost, the less we have to lose.
And the fiercer and more invincible we become.
—
Never, NEVER strip a mother and force her into a corner.
When protecting herself and her children is all she can think about, her fangs and claws will be revealed.
It would have been so much better if you had chosen to protect her.
—
Yes, we can walk away from your church. But walking away costs us dearly.
Walking away from a church may cost us most of our friends, our reputation, support, sense of belonging and “family.”
It may cost us our ability to function in the community, including holding a job.
It may mean that church rallying around the abuser, helping him in the court process and influencing the judge against the victims.
It may mean being slandered, officially excommunicated and shunned. It may mean having all the other churches in the community refusing our attendance.
It may mean being stalked, reported to the abuser, turned in to child services, or verbally attacked on the street.
All in the name of god.
And if we believe their sick bu11$#i+, we also risk rejection by god, and even eternal damnation in hellfire.
—Brenda Linn
Brenda was angry and rightfully so. She’s a believer. She expected her pastor and church, where she had generously given, volunteered, and attended for years, to be a place of protection, but it wasn’t. To her horror, the church abused her even more. She was a committed Christian, a gold-standard wife and mother, but she was betrayed by the very people who should have cared. Like the beaten man in the Good Samaritan story, Brenda was abandoned, ignored, and erased.
Brenda isn’t unusual. Evangelicalism has a terrible problem: It shoots its own divorcees, as a Feb 2020 Christianity Today article demonstrated. A million evangelical divorcees cannot find a church that loves and cares for them and supports their decision to get a divorce. And the policies of Evangelical churches, including the Southern Baptist Convention, make it worse, as this comparison chart shows.
A day of reckoning is coming for Evangelicalism. It’s time to look all the biblical passages about abuse and decide that you will care for abuse victims by supporting their decision to divorce.
Brenda says “My present church is great. Our pastor is a real shepherd. He protects his flock, and seeks to bring support and healing to the downtrodden and brokenhearted. Unfortunately he is unusual. He is the first real shepherd I have found in 28 years. This should not be.”
Here’s another letter from an abused Christian wife. The letter I’ll never send: “Due to friendship given to an abuser but not to the survivor, Due to a failure to believe the survivor, Due to the withdrawal of friendship when the survivor made efforts to leave an abusive relationship, Due to the repeated hypocrisy observed within leadership, Due to the harmful rhetoric used, Due to the harmful guidance offered, Due to the false and dangerous belief that having more sex will solve marital problems, Due to the unwillingness of church leadership to listen to concerns about the health and safety of a relationship, Due to the repeated minimization of suicidal threats and domestic violence, Due to the evidentiary belief that a marriage is more important than the health and safety of those in it, Due to words, actions, and inaction of church staff, I request to immediately terminate my membership and affiliation with this church. Enclosed are educational materials for church staff and leadership. May you be better to the next survivor than you were to me.”
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Examples of 150 examples of types of abuse (physical, emotional, spiritual, sexual, financial, and neglect) and explaining the term “gaslighting,” along with many first-person stories, read Chapter 4 in The Life-Saving Divorce.
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