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Role of Christian Religion in Domestic Violence

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 male dominated 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, which required therapeutic intervention.

In contrast, Clark (1997) explored a number of Canadian studies dealing with domestic violence in evangelical subcultures and came to the opposite conclusion. She indicated that there is no evidence that these subcultures, even with an emphasis on wifely submission and hierarchical gender relations, increase the incidence of wife abuse. She noted that pastors and other evangelical women often encouraged abused women to leave their relationships, and many pastors were involved in counseling both parties in those situations. She did acknowledge, however, that the values of evangelical subcultures do lead to a serious underrecognition of the rate of wife abuse within the faith community. She also indicated that these values led pastors to support reconciliation as the ultimate goal, rather than marital termination, that the values may lead abused women to delay ge...

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Role of Christian Religion in Domestic Violence. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 17:45, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1693859.html