As the responses poured in to the ABC’s story on domestic violence in evangelical churches, I was reminded of the discomfort Saint Augustine showed, in The Confessions, towards his father beating his mother. But he still praised his mother for placating her husband to avoid beatings, and for criticising wives who were beaten.
Augustine, then, while possibly opposing domestic violence, had no idea what to do about it, and endorsed behaviour that made it worse. We still can’t be sure of the extent of domestic violence among regular evangelical churchgoers compared with other Australians. Still, the harrowing testimonies the ABC revealed establish an undeniable problem of perpetrators justifying themselves through the doctrine of male ‘headship’.
Many evangelical leaders responded to the story with sorrow, and apologised profusely that domestic violence happened on their watch. But then they suggested that domestic violence was merely caused by a few sick individuals misunderstanding that doctrine.
Those responding this way sincerely and wholeheartedly want to do more for survivors. Still, I worry that their response stops them from doing precisely that—even regardless of whether the doctrine of headship is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.![]()
That doctrine says that men are to be the leaders in their marriages and the church. Women must submit. Evangelical leaders have argued that for a husband to hurt his wife while saying she must obey him is an ‘abuse’ of the doctrine.
They don’t have much choice but to say this if they want to hold on to the doctrine, which they think is the one faithful reading of Scripture, and which has increasingly defined evangelical religious identity since the 1980s. But the claim is strangely revisionist.
For most of Christian history, headship was, in fact, used to justify domestic violence. ‘Just’ battery of wives was taken for granted in medieval Christian literature. It’s true that, after the Protestant Reformation, wife beating was outlawed in parts of Calvinist Europe. But this, historically, was anomalous, and so we can read someone like T DeWitt Talmage, one of 19th century America’s most prominent Presbyterians, who preached in 1886 that ‘the death of a good wife in sacrifice and love [is] her first and greatest glory, "a queen’s coronation’'.
To be consistent, evangelicals wanting to maintain male headship would have to label these abuses as well. But, for a movement claiming adherence to the Bible’s timeless truths, it took a tragically long time for them to stop equivocating about this. And they did so only after feminism—reviled by many evangelicals—dragged domestic violence into the public spotlight. Some honest reflection about why Christians read the Bible so wrongly, and for so long, is in order.
"For most of Christian history, headship was, in fact, used to justify domestic violence."
But there’s another issue with saying that domestic violence is an ‘abuse’ of otherwise good theology. That suggests domestic violence is a problem simply caused by individual bad apples. Evangelicals strongly emphasise sin as a matter of individual responsibility: if I do the wrong thing, that was my choice alone.
However, a famous American study showed that this way of thinking makes social problems like racial inequality worse, because it blinds evangelicals to that inequality’s social and economic dimensions. Likewise, I worry that framing domestic violence as a problem primarily about individuals will stop a fuller examination into the cultural and structural reasons for why evangelicals have inadequately responded to survivors.
Regardless of whether the doctrine of headship does increase the prevalence of domestic violence – and the ABC is right that more research is desperately needed – that violence is not just an individual problem, but a communal one.
We need to ask questions like: what leads survivors not to report violence to their pastors or church peers? When are they not believed? Are pastors and Christian counsellors getting enough training for how to respond to domestic violence? When do congregational programs targeted specifically at domestic violence succeed or fail? When there is an inadequate response to a survivor, what role was played by Christian understandings of masculinity and femininity? What role was played by certain understandings about Christian forgiveness?
The point is that, even if domestic violence only involves an ‘abuse’ of the doctrine of headship, the doctrine nevertheless operates in a cultural and hierarchical ecosystem that made the abuse, and lack of response, possible. And whether headship is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is a different question from how it is more prone to misuse than, say, egalitarian conceptions of gender.
It didn’t have to be this way. According to Leviticus 16, each year the priest had to release a goat into the wilderness, to atone for the whole community’s sin. The Bible itself, then, understands wrongdoing not just as a matter of individual responsibility, but as embedded in a greater cultural whole. Evangelicals would do well to remember that.
Sean Lau is a Rhodes Scholar researching for a DPhil in Theology at Trinity College, Oxford. He has previously practised as a solicitor in Sydney.