Domestic violence is an important social issue. There are many explanations of why it occurs and what supports its continuation, including a feminist explanation that patriarchal culture, and religion, contribute extensively to its occurrence.
My intention was to explore that perception by reviewing some of the literature. That proved inconclusive, since the literature is ambiguous about the role of religion in relationship to domestic violence. It can both support domestic violence and condemn it.
I followed up the literature review with a small-scale study exploring the incidence of domestic violence in two African-American congregations, one Pentecostal and one Black Muslim. I used Straus' (1996) revised Conflict Tactics Scale. My expectation was that I would find fewer incidents of domestic violence in the Black Muslim group, since one of its tenets was the protection of women and children.
There are many controversies in the domestic violence literature, including the degree to which women are offenders, the numbers of abused women, and the differing types of abuse that men and women are subjected to. There is also question in the literature about the role religion, generally Christianity, has played in the development of relationships characterized by domestic violence.
For example, in their study, Giesbrecht and Sevcik (2000) noted that abused women from conservative evangelical subcultures were affected by the patriarchal nature of those subcultures in becoming involved in violent relationships, in staying with those relationships, and in having difficulty recovering from those relationships and building new, healthy identities. For these women, church participation and conservative beliefs had been an integral part of their identity which interfered with recovery from abuse. They had specific issues, such as automatic deference to male authority and belief in the inferiority of the female before God, w...