The article highlighted below begins with Megan Wohlers telling her story of abuse, and ends with these understated words from her:
And that’s not how Jesus would have acted.
Esther, my partner, works with MCCBC End Abuse in support of women in abusive relationships. A majority of them are from conservative evangelical churches in the Fraser Valley, British Columbia. The program follows a curriculum, and workers are trained by one of the authors of: When Love Hurts. That author is Karen McAndless-Davis. Esther and I are privileged also to facilitate the Home Improvement Program that works with men perpetrating the harm. There is much hopefulness in both programs.
That said, what is in the article highlighted below is sick and disgusting. But it is no surprise. In my post, Evangelicals, Let’s Talk About Violence Against Women, the author of the highlighted article, Kristin Kobes du Mez writes:
In part, evangelical political identity coalesced around opposition to feminism (among other things). When feminists championed legislation to curb violence against women, evangelicals’ first instinct was to oppose it. But there was more to their resistance than knee-jerk reactionary politics. Evangelical identity was (and is) based in a gender system that makes violence against women easier to dismiss, excuse, and deny.
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Bushnell1 and Southard2, however, remained minority voices. The majority of evangelicals in the twentieth century preferred to uphold a patriarchal gender order, defend it as God’s will, and even situate it as a nonnegotiable requirement of the Christian faith. This explains why, in the midst of the recent deluge of abuse allegationssweeping through evangelical communities, someone like John Pipercould confidently blame the abuse of women on an “egalitarian myth,” not on the unequal power relations evangelicals have imposed on women and men. For evangelicals like Piper, complementarianism—which enshrines male authority over women in church, home, and society—is the solution, not the problem (emphasis added).
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It’s worth noting that evangelicals are not speaking with one voice on this topic. Forty-eight percent of white evangelicals support an unrepentant perpetrator of sexual assault, but 36% find this unacceptable. Women like Beth Moore, Jen Pollock Michel, and Karen Swallow Prior (and many men, too) are speaking out in defense of sexual assault victims. Initially cautious when it came to the Kavanaugh allegations, Pollock Michel was stirred by what she heard at the hearing: “I don’t know how you hear that as a woman without feeling the complete horror and panic of that moment,” she explained to the Washington Post, referring to Ford’s account of the alleged assault. “As evangelical Christians, we say that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. I think it really is a moment for us to be asking ourselves as Christians about our own kind of hunger for righteousness.”
As in the past, this view seems to be the minority view.
Please see my Book Review of: Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by the same author of the article above, Kristin Kobes du Mez.
She makes clear again in the final chapter that
. . . evangelicalism must be seen as a cultural and political movement rather than as a community defined chiefly by its theology (p. 298).
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