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Evangelical Organizations’ Responses to Domestic Violence: How the Cultural Production of Religious Beliefs Challenges or Enshrines Patriarchy

  • Original Research
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Review of Religious Research

Abstract

Background

A significant body of research has established the central role of religion in creating and preserving cultural beliefs about gender. But existing studies have tended to focus more on the multiplicity and flexibility of religious beliefs about gender, and less on the ways in which the cultural production of varying religious beliefs about gender can involve active conflict. Attending to the institutional processes that shape the production of competing beliefs is important for considering how religion can challenge or enshrine patriarchy.

Purpose

This paper examines how religiously formed beliefs about gender are produced through organizational conflict to shape varying public responses to survivors of domestic violence.

Methods

The paper employs a qualitative, comparative research design to analyze the public discourse of two evangelical organizations that were founded to produce and promote two competing gender ideologies in the contemporary evangelical movement: complementarianism and egalitarianism. Analyzing the public discourse of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and Christians for Biblical Equality from 1987 to 2018, I coded for the ways in which both their beliefs about creation, sin, and submission and their references to one another’s ideologies shape their different attention to abused women’s experiences.

Results

Christians for Biblical Equality both presents domestic violence as a distortion of God-ordained equality and critiques patriarchal theology for contributing to domestic violence. The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood both presents domestic violence as a distortion of God-ordained male authority and defends their ideology against criticisms that it promotes abuse. This intersection of beliefs and organizational conflict results in either centering or pivoting away from abused women’s experiences.

Conclusions and Implications

This study illustrates the importance of examining how the institutional processes that produce hegemonic and alternative religious belief systems about gender are marked by the negotiation of both organizational and gendered power. In making this argument, the paper contributes to our understanding of how religiously formed cultural belief systems can challenge or reinforce patriarchy.

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Notes

  1. CBE’s decision not to publish the joint statement because of their understanding of the role of theology in abuse was also confirmed in an interview I conducted with one of the founders of CBE in 2009.

  2. It is important to note that the paper focuses specifically on the negotiation of organizational and gendered power within cultural production processes of key evangelical institutions. The focus of this analysis is not on the ways in which these processes shape everyday evangelical beliefs and behavior, nor should such a relationship be assumed.

  3. I am grateful to one of the reviewers for this language of “second-order hegemony.”

  4. Julie Ingersoll’s (2003) study represents an important exception in the vast array of studies of gender and religion that have analyzed multiplicity, flexibility, and contingency. Her analysis of CBE and the Southern Baptist Convention illuminates some of the consequences of the gender debate for evangelical women’s everyday experiences in various institutions. I shift our focus to the public discourse of two organizations that have been the flagship para-church organizations representing the two key ideologies. Focusing on these two organizations’ discourse allows us to bring the conflict, itself, more centrally into view.

  5. There are deeper, historically rooted patterns regarding gender in evangelicalism, as such scholars as Barr (2021), DuMez (2020), and Gallagher (2003) have documented. This paper’s focus is on the ways in which the contemporary evangelical movement in the U.S. has been embroiled in a conflict over gender, one that is central to contemporary evangelical identity (Ingersoll 2003).

  6. Unfortunately, there has not been a more recent, national survey that explicitly asks evangelicals about their views of headship and submission since Gallagher’s work (2003; 2004a; 2004b; Gallagher & Smith 1999). As I show throughout this section, we do have some ways to consider the extent to which these ideologies continue to hold symbolic and/or practical value to evangelicals today. But I acknowledge that this lack of current survey data on evangelical beliefs about headship and submission is an important limitation.

  7. The ECFA member profile for CBE can be found here: https://www.ecfa.org/MemberProfile.aspx?ID=7313. CBMW’s can be found here: https://www.ecfa.org/MemberProfile.aspx?ID=12088.

  8. Asproth refers to Piper’s comments in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OkUPc2NLrM.

  9. This piece is in a CBMW journal issue that is no longer on CBMW’s website. Bayly republished the piece on a personal blog on October 26, 2020: https://warhornmedia.com/2020/10/26/women-who-abuse-feminists-big-lie/.

  10. Tracy had written an article for CBMW in 2003 which explained why complementarians should care about abuse and suggested a biblical model for understanding how wives’ submission and husbands’ authority should be rightly enacted to prevent abuse. But he then wrote two pieces for CBE in 2007 and 2009. Lambert critiques an article that Tracy published in 2008 in an evangelical theology journal not sponsored by either organization.

  11. I am grateful to one of the reviewers for suggesting this point.

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Mary Ellen Konieczny (in memoriam), Abigail Ocobock, Felicia Song, Lisa Weaver-Swartz, and the members of the Gender Studies writing group at Westmont College for their helpful comments on various iterations of this article. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for their instructive feedback. Thanks to Magnolia Smith and Mackinzie Warne-McGraw for their able research assistance. The author gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame and the Provost’s Office at Westmont College.

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    Meredith Whitnah PhD

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Whitnah, M. Evangelical Organizations’ Responses to Domestic Violence: How the Cultural Production of Religious Beliefs Challenges or Enshrines Patriarchy. Rev Relig Res 64, 427–450 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-022-00493-2

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