Escaping an abusive marriage is no easy task for many evangelical women, many of whom have pastors that say physical abuse is no reason for divorce.

Biblical Battered Wife Syndrome: Christian Women and Domestic Violence

By Kathryn Joyce

What is a good enough reason for divorce? Well, according to Rick Warren’s Saddleback church, divorce is only permitted in cases of adultery or abandonment — as these are the only cases permitted in the Bible — and never for abuse.

As teaching pastor Tom Holladay explains, spousal abuse should be dealt with by temporary separation and church marriage counseling designed to bring about reconciliation between the couple. But to qualify for that separation, your spouse must be in the “habit of beating you regularly,” and not be simply someone who “grabbed you once.”

“How many beatings would have to take place in order to qualify as regularly?” asks Jocelyn Andersen, a Christian domestic violence survivor and advocate, author of the 2007 book Woman Submit! Christians and Domestic Violence, an indictment of church teachings of wifely submission and male headship. As she sees it, by convincing women that leaving their relationships is not an option, these teachings have laid the ground for a domestic violence epidemic within the church.

Andersen writes from personal experience, describing an episode of being held hostage by her husband — an associate pastor in their Kansas Baptist church — for close to twenty hours after he’d nearly fractured her skull. Andersen was raised in the Southern Baptist Convention, where she heard an unremitting message of “submission, submission, submission.” She saw this continual focus reflected in her ex-husband’s denunciations, while he detained her, of women who wanted to “rule over men.” Though Andersen was rescued by her church’s pastor, who had his assistant pastor arrested himself, she says other churchwomen aren’t so lucky, particularly when churches tell couples to attend joint marriage counseling under lay ministry leaders with no specific training for abuse survivors, who instead offer an unswerving prescription of submission and headship, often telling women to learn to submit “better.”

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Obama Decries Wall Street Bonuses

Last week, Barack Obama called Wall Street executives who awarded themselves $18.4 billion at the end of 2008 as “shameful.” What do you think?

Jerrod Kissin,
Systems Analyst
“He was being presidential but I would have been fine with him calling them fucking assholes.”

Gina Ahlquist,
Production Planner
“Damn right it’s shameful! These guys should hire some people to hang their heads in an act of contrition.”

Jeffrey Brooks,
CEO
“Unfortunately, as a corporate executive, I don’t possess the emotional faculties required to empathize with other humans or to register this feeling you know as ’shame.’”

Steelers win. Yawn.

Today’s video of the day comes from The Daily Show, where they compare Obama’s inaugural address to George W. Bush’s. This is hot, son!