A number of years ago, I attended a seminar in Ohio on domestic violence. One of the presenters was a person that had been abused, physically beaten almost mortally. She left her abuser and sought pastoral counseling from her minister. His words to her were unforgettable. He said, “Sister; God wants you back with your husband!” This was a daughter of the church and a long term member of that particular parish and it was difficult for her to contradict her pastor, but she replied, “God doesn’t want me dead! And, that’s what I am going to be if I go back there!”
She left that church. However, churches and other religious institutions have counseled people to return to their abusers in order to maintain “the sanctity of marriage” for many years. We have become conspirators in abuse.
It is difficult enough to help people to build up the courage to leave an abuser without religious people telling victims to go back for more. And, victims do go back. They return to partners that harm them. They return even from shelters where they are protected.
There was an occasion when a woman from a social service agency and I intervened with a woman who had been severely beaten in order to get her and her children away from her violent husband. We got her out of state and with her parents over 1,000 miles away. She cam back and her husband tried to hunt us down, because we had taken her away. Fortunately, I used an assumed name and someone else’s car and her never found us.
Why did she return? Her parents; good church going folks, told her that it was her “Christian duty” to save her marriage.
We have been complicit in the cycle of abuse to the detriment of society at large and to our own members. Certainly no one wants to break up a marriage precipitously, but there are worse things than divorce. Religions that do not recognize divorce s=certainly cannot condone violence.
There are other ways to separate than divorce, so keeping someone in peril to keep a marriage intact is not an excuse. We have to get out of the business of enabling abuse. Religious people can stand up for the victims over any institution. Preserving institutions in not spiritual, it’s worldly and sometimes, stupid.
chaplaintomdoc 