The Battered Wife: How Christians Confront Family Violence. - Review - book reviews

Sociology of Religion, Fall, 1999 by Penny Edgell Becker

by NANCY NASON-CLARK. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997, 185 pp. $18.00 (pbk).

This book reports on an extensive set of linked Canadian studies that document the experiences of evangelical women who are victims of domestic violence and the response of evangelical congregations to these women. We learn how these women view and explain their experiences, how clergy respond to them in counseling situations, and how their sister churchwomen reach out with practical and compassionate support. To my knowledge, there is no other book that explores this issue in such depth and with such richness of data, including surveys of pastors, focus groups of evangelical women, and in-depth interviews with both pastors and abuse victims.

The author dispels misconceptions about the relationship between evangelical culture and theology and how these communities handle abuse. She argues convincingly that evangelical women are not merely passive victims of abuse but have agency in defining their own situation and seeking remedy, often with the active support of other evangelical churchwomen. We learn that pastors, contrary to the stereotype about them within secular social service agencies, do not simply tell victims of wife-abuse to "go home and pray about it." Many are engaged in ongoing weekly counseling sessions with both parties. They encourage women to leave the abusive situation and seek shelter, and will refer women to outside counseling and services in cases of ongoing abuse.

In fact, the author concludes there is no evidence that the evangelical subculture, with its emphasis on wifely submission and hierarchical gender relations, increases the incidence of wife abuse. However, she argues, it does lead to a serious misrecognition of the rate of wife abuse within the faith community. It leads pastors to favor the ultimate reconciliation of abusive marriages rather than their termination, and may lead some abused women to delay seeking help or to assume their churches will be unresponsive to their situation.

Because this study is so careful to get the insider's point of view right, there is a lot of attention paid to defining terms. We learn why evangelicals prefer to talk about 'family violence" rather than the more feminist terms "wife abuse" or "battered wives." There is a long discussion of how and in what way abused women can be understood as "agents" of their own lives. It is somewhat surprising, then, that the author uses the term "Christian" in the way she does. In most places she carefully emphasizes that her data are about evangelicals, one subgroup of Christians. But in other places the discussion elides these two terms, implying that what is true of evangelicals is true of Christians more generally. In some ways this is accurate; almost all Christian churches emphasize and idealize the family, for example. Yet knowing how evangelical pastors react to wife abuse does not necessarily tell us how a Catholic priest or a liberal Protestant pastor would react. Some faith traditions are more comfortable with feminism and individualism, and may well eschew the emphasis on maintaining the family unit at all costs that evangelicals bring to wife-abuse situations.

I found myself wishing that the author had done more of some kinds of analyses. For example, we learn that evangelical pastors who have more experience in counseling victims of wife abuse are less willing to attribute blame to the woman and more willing to refer them to outside agencies for help. But there could have been statistical analyses to determine if other factors (for example, the pastor's age) play a role in how pastors handle abuse situations. Likewise, the follow-up in-depth interviews presented pastors with vignettes of typical abuse situations and asked how they handled similar situations. I wanted to learn more about their responses; for example, do all pastors accept the sharp dichotomy between serious, on.going abuse and lower-level or more sporadic violence evidenced in the writings of evangelical psychologist James Dobson? One gets the feeling that the treatment of these interviews only skims the surface of what is likely available from them.

So I hope that we continue to hear more from this fascinating and truly important set of research projects. This volume is a good start. The writing is clear and free of jargon. The chapters are thematically organized and yet stand alone, making them easy to assign together or separately. This book would be appropriate for courses on religion and the family, religion and gender, evangelicalism, or religious subcultures, at both the undergraduate and introductory graduate levels. It should be a must-read for seminary students, denominational officials, and involved laity, containing as it does useful suggestions for helping pastors and congregations to be more aware of and responsive to the needs of abused women.

Penny Edgell Becker

Cornell University