Women, Why Are You Weeping?: Examining the Churches Response to Domestic Violence

By Frank S. Morris Ph.D.

Christian husbands are cursing, choking, punching, beating, kicking, and in some instances, using weapons to assault their wives. Women, Why Are You Weeping? describes how trust is broken and collusive alliances are formed whenever the church chooses to not get involved in family violence issues. When juxtaposed to Mary Magdalene’s traumatic discovery at the tomb that caused her to cry—“they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him”—this writing offers insight into ways Christ is poorly embodied when he is portrayed as complicitous in our unjust acts. Women, Why Are You Weeping? is an appropriate inquiry into the depth of disappointments our fellow heirs of the grace of life undergo. This question only appears twice in Scripture. In both instances, it is posed by divine beings looking into the affairs of mankind. Policy and practical change will occur when the church views the violence as a concern of all God’s people, particularly clergy. If the unredeemed can be there to listen to and comfort victims and have invested the money and time needed to give the victim/survivors the encouragement and hope they so desperately seek, how can the redeemed do less?

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Feb 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781973654087

Frank S. Morris Ph.D.

Frank S. Morris, is an ordained Baptist Minister who advocates ending violence against women. He has trained with the New Jersey Coalition of Battered Women, and A Call to Men, and earned post-graduate degrees in Biblical Counseling and a Doctorate in Philosophy. He is the recipient of Women Rising Inc., and Harambe Social Services Inc., New Jersey, “2016 Above and Beyond,” and “2017 UJIMA,” awards respectively. He promotes and encourages pastoral and congregational awareness of domestic violence, generating support for its victims. Frank is an advocate • counselor • educator • victim/survivor committed to ending violence against women.

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Copyright © 2019 Frank S. Morris, Ph.D.

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ISBN: 978-1-9736-5407-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9736-5409-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9736-5408-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019901880

WestBow Press rev. date: 2/28/2019

Contents

Preface

Why I Chose This as the Title

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Distorting the Very Image of God.

Chapter I What Do We Mean by The Term Domestic Violence?

Theology of Suffering in Early Christianity

Chapter II Critical Literature Review

Domestic Violence: How Prevalent is it, and What are its Effects?

How Did We Get Here?

Domestic Violence: Is it Actually Happening in the Church?

Intervention: How Can the Church Help the Victim?

Intervention: What Can the Church do to Help the Perpetrator of Violence?

Have Theological Issues Hindered or Helped the Church Confront Domestic Violence?

What Else Must the Church do?

Educating the Congregation.

Chapter III It is Bigger Than A Fist Fight

The Objectives of Domestic Violence.

Family Intimidation and Disruption

What About Other Points of View?

Chapter IV Statistically Speaking

Chapter V Is the Church Helping or Hurting?

Clergy Misconduct

Chapter VI The Journey Towards Freedom

Listen, Learn and Believe

Put the Victim’s Safety First

Distinguishing Types of Abusive Behavior

Prevention: Restructuring the Churches Response and Recognizing Barriers to Action

Committing to a Church Position

Entrusting Clergy Training to Domestic Violence Professionals

Breaking Through a Lifetime of Silence

Conclusion

Bibliography

Illustrations

Figures

1. Power and Control Wheel

2. Percentage Distribution of Adult Physical Assault Victims/ Adult Stalking Victims.

3. Percentage Distribution of Adult Victims of Violence by Victim-

Perpetrator Relationship and Victim Gender: All types of Victimization

4. Percentage Distributions:

Adult Rape and Physical Assault Victim by Victim-Perpetrator

Relationship and Victim Gender.

Adult Female Victims by Type of Victimization and Perpetrator Gender.

Adult Male Victims by Type of Victimization and Perpetrator Gender.

5. Domestic Violence Personalized Safety Plan.

6. Signs of Abuse: A Checklist for Adults and Teens

7. Dr. R.C. Sproul’s Letter

8. Flow Chart for Handling Domestic Violence Calls

9. The Cycle of Violence

10. Barriers to Leaving a Violenct Relationship

Tables

The Cycle of Violence Chart

Preface

Women, Why Are You Weeping?

Examining the Churches Response to Domestic Violence

T his proposed study explores how the Church responds to domestic violence among members of the community of faith. Are interventions and efforts to prevent violence against women based upon the principles and precepts taught in Scriptures? This study describes how trusts are broken and collusive alliances are formed, whenever the Church chooses to not get involved in family violence issues. Notwithstanding, the myriad of ways Christ is poorly embodied when portrayed as complicit in our unjust acts.

The church fails to validate the injustices committed against women by failing to let them know what has happened or is happening to them is criminal, sinful, unjust, and wrong. Change will occur in proportion to the Church’s determination to embrace its divinely mandated role in domestic violence prevention and intervention, when it views the violence as a concern of all God’s people, particularly clergy. Reaffirming the sufficiency of Scriptures is foundational to all issues pertaining to life and godliness and will thrust the church into action. The significance of this study is to enable the development of theologically sound responses, excellent ministry resources, and partnerships, all of which will position the Church to maximize her response.

Why I Chose This as the Title

Women, Why Are You Weeping? is an appropriate contemporary inquiry into the depth of disappointments our fellow heirs and partakers of the grace of life undergo within the body of Christ. This question appears twice in Scripture. In both instances it is posed by divine beings looking into the affairs of mankind. As reported in the twentieth chapter of John’s gospel, verses 13 and 15, The woman being questioned was distraught and in tears because she could not locate the body of Jesus. Her response to the questions follows, … they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid Him. This historical event has found its way into the lament of some women in our churches today. Women, who having turned to Christ with great expectancy, have not found Him or His doctrine being carried out in the earthly tabernacle.

Women, Why Are You Weeping? is a relevant title and question, since it relates to the historical and current practices and experiences of women generally and Christian women. Christian husbands are cursing, choking, punching, beating, kicking and sometimes using weapons to assault their wives. Of the nearly 4 million women physically abused annually by their husbands or boyfriends, (this number is inaccurate, since typically much of the violence goes unreported) an undetermined number of them are Christians. Stopping this endemic physical, psychological, and verbal violence against women within the household of faith is a daunting task.

This work is dedicated to

My mother

Geraldine A. Morris (a victim)

To you my lovely wife Phyllis, for 35 years together heirs

of the

Grace of life, you are a woman of quiet fortitude and tremendous faith

My children Oji, Kimya, Jonathan

Jabari and Maia

Acknowledgements

Pastor Keith C. Treadwell, Ocean Avenue Baptist Church, Jersey City NJ.

Pastor Nathaniel Smith, Third Baptist Church, Springfield MA.

The late Reverend Dr. Jasper E. Peyton and

The late Reverend Dr. William Augustus Jones Jr.,

Bethany Baptist Church. Brooklyn NY

Thanks to the women especially

Lynn Kelly YWCA Union County NJ

And to all the wonderful women who

continue to teach, enlighten,

and encourage me, especially my victims.

Thank you

Tony Porter and Ted Bunch A Call to Men

Women Rising of Hudson County N.J.

New Jersey Coalition of Battered Women

Special thanks to Lauren Yarber

For editing the manuscript.

Her suggestions improved the book greatly.

Introduction

T he decision to write on the subject of domestic violence and how the church should respond to domestic violence had its genesis nearly 60 years ago. To know how many children have cringed in fearful horror upon hearing their mom’s sobbing and screaming while cowering to protect herself and sometimes themselves from the pummeling of her husband is inconceivable. In such situations however, a child’s interventions are more often than not useless, save to interrupt the onslaught long enough to provide some interlude in the unfolding fight if it could be called that. Demonstrably weaker than her aggressor, a woman’s response to being battered is typically relegated to a defensive posture. Her natural impulse to resist being punched or slapped is relinquished primarily to protect her children from the ensuing onslaught. This offensive behavior has been put on a normal footing with other humiliating and dismissive behaviors placed upon women in the pretext of wifely duties or more as the property of men. In some twisted way, this behavior has gained apologists in government, polite society and in our churches. To be concise it was not and still is not an abnormality for a man to strike a woman, particularly if that woman is his wife. Such statements may seem conjectural, but even a scant view of the limited social media in the early days of television seemed to lend credence to this behavior by men.

The oft-repeated catchphrase of television’s The Honeymooners principal character Ralph Kramden who, with fist clenched in his wife Alice’s face would scream, Pow! Zoom! Right in the kisser, you’re going to the moon, Alice! The comedic jesting of Ralph, although seemingly hilarious, depicted a real and ever worrisome reality for millions of homemakers and others who are indirectly affected. Comedy is a thought-provoking business in which some of the graver issues in life are laughed about publicly. Comedians are no more than modern day court jesters whose functions have neither increased nor decreased. Their primary task is to tell it as they see it. In some quarters, their words may assuage the deviousness of actions and attitudes hurtful to others or humorously used to declare a thing to be just the way things are.

All the other court functionaries cooked up the king’s facts for him before delivery; … The jester was the only person permitted to tell the king the ugly, un-upholstered truth about things as he saw them, even about royalty itself and the most intimate matters about royalty; and he was not only permitted but expected to do this. The jester criticized State policies in a full-mouthed way that would have insured anybody else a life sojourn in the Bastille, and he got praise and favor for it. (Nock 1928)

One irony of the ugly business of domestic violence is the cavalier stance taken by other men, especially men in authoritative positions. The attitude displayed seems to say, almost embarrassingly to the abuser, your business has become public and you need to clean this up quickly. In instances too numerous to count, conversations with police officers summoned during the night to quell a domestic violence disturbance seemed to assuage the batterer’s anger while urging the victim to try not to agitate her assailant so much. One of the most mystical moments of the intervention is when the assailant produces work identification, particularly if he is a public employee. The incident is dismissed, in knee jerk like fashion, with no arrests. From day to day, week to week, year in and year out, similar situations like the above-described scenario are played out with variation throughout every community, hamlet, village, and town in the universe. The universality of violence against women has a long and sordid history, whether draped in the verbiage of "honor killings, keeping my woman in check or merely your typical weekend beat-down."

Initially, it was difficult to identify the real problem, but it became clear and apparent that no one cared about what was happening to women. . In 1962, the judicial decision to transfer domestic violence cases from Criminal Court to Family Court effectively decriminalized domestic violence cases in New York State, suspending any doubt about the lack of concern for victims of domestic violence. (McCue 2008, 129) In Family Court, only civil procedures apply. Accordingly, Cornell University Law School’s Legal Information Institute offers this overview of the civil proceedings, Broadly speaking, the procedure consists of the rules by which courts conduct civil trials. ‘Civil trials’ concern the judicial resolution of claims by one individual or group against another and are to be distinguished from ‘criminal trials,’ in which the state prosecutes an individual for a violation of criminal law. (Cornell Law School 2007) That means the husband or batterer will never face the harsher penalties he would have faced if found guilty in a criminal court of law for assaulting a stranger.

Somewhere as you are reading this, a mother flees for safety in the dark of night, bleeding, barefoot and perhaps donning nothing more than a slip indicative of her unpreparedness for her flight. She runs through rain, snow and or peril of night seeking safety often with her children in tow. It is a difficult and dangerous situation yet unfortunately a common one. For many believers in such moments of despair, the church comes to mind; the one place most associated with refuge, safety, and immunity from abuse.

One of the greatest films of the 1930’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, placed an indelible impression of the church in my heart. The story’s protagonist Quasimodo (played by Charles Laughton) is a grotesque hunchbacked orphan and bell-ringer of Notre Dame who suffers many indignities and beatings in this film. During one such brutal beating, a compassionate gypsy girl named Esmeralda offers him a cup of water to quench his thirst. Later in the film, Esmeralda (played by Maureen O’Hara) is sentenced to hang for witchcraft in front of the Notre Dame Cathedral. Quasimodo, the cathedral bell ringer seized the rope with his feet, knees and hands and swoops down in a single bound by the bell rope and with outstretched hand carries Esmeralda off into the cathedral, under the law of sanctuary, he rescues her from certain death. That is at least conceivably what some might think of when envisioning the church as a sanctuary. James Poling expresses a similar view of sanctuary, when he addresses the need to reconstruct Christian theology and change our preaching: he says,

In terms of hermeneutical method, I start with the premise that humans do not have access to a pure gospel undistorted by history and social location…Even conservative religious creeds teach that the scriptures must be rightly explained [2 Tim. 2:15] and interpreted by the Holy Spirit. Historical research is crucial because it forces the church to uncover the layers of distortion starting in the oral traditions and continuing through every version of the Bible and its interpretations. Searching for the truth is a crucial aspect of deconstructing any lies about Jesus. Therefore, we must have a hermeneutics of suspicion of attempts of Christian groups to misuse the gospel for their own privilege and power.

My method is also based on a hermeneutics of confession that Jesus as a spiritual power continues to empower those who are faithful to God. The love and power of Jesus lives in people’s struggles for survival and freedom in the face of massive evil and injustice. Church leaders are called to become attuned to Jesus’ spirit in the scriptures and to bring voice to the gospel. Jesus lived and died and was resurrected in the past, and Jesus lives, dies and is resurrected every day when violence against the vulnerable is resisted. Learning to see Jesus in the present is a way of remaining faithful to the Jesus the Bible proclaims as fellow-sufferer. (Poling 2003, 176-177)

The abovementioned cinematic imagery pales alongside another image I became intimately acquainted with, the image of Jesus Christ on the cross at Calvary. His atoning sacrifice for all of humanity is stunningly breathtaking and beautifully illustrates the depth of God’s love for all creation. Swooping down from the cross, Christ rescues the disinherited and makes us sons and daughters, and joint heirs of his kingdom.

The church is the one place where the poor, captives, the blind and the oppressed can turn to according to the prophet Isaiah. On his first opportunity to speak in the synagogue, Jesus made Isaiah’s prophesy his working manifesto. James A. Borland says, For Christ, women have an intrinsic value equal to that of men. Jesus said, …at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’ (Matthew 19:4; cf. Genesis 1:27). He says, Women are created in the image of God just as men are. Like men, they have self-awareness, personal freedom, a measure of self-determination, and personal responsibility for their actions. (Borland 1991, 114) Borland references Scanzoni and Hardesty stating,,

Jesus came to earth not primarily as a male but as a person. He treated women not primarily as females but as human beings. Jesus recognized women as fellow human beings. Disciples come in two sexes, male and female. Jesus sees females as genuine persons, not simply as the objects of male desire. Hurley believes the foundation-stone of Jesus’ attitude toward women was his vision of them as persons to whom and for whom he had come. He did not perceive them primarily in terms of their sex, age or marital status; he seems to have considered them regarding their relation (or lack of one) to God. (Ibid., 114)

Regrettably, the ideal is often not as evident as most would like to believe in our churches. Inequality and injustice are at the heart of troublesome life experiences, sated with many personally attributable contributions that heighten the dreadfulness of such a life, many of which continue to surface to this day. One passage of scripture in the gospel of John speaks forcefully to the churches silence on domestic violence, and may best express the sentiment of many Christian women living in the grips of terror and violence in their Christian homes. Where is the compassion, tender-heartedness, and support she was taught to expect within the household of faith? Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has not the health of the daughter of my people been restored? (Jeremiah 8:22) The twentieth chapter of the gospel of John beginning at verse eleven reads,

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. And as she wept she stooped to look into the tomb. And she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet. They said to her, Woman, why are you weeping? She said to them They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid Him. Having said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking? Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away. (John 20:11-15) ESV

Notwithstanding its immediate context, in this passage, we hear the troublesome voicing of yet another woman unidentified, crying out. Her puzzlement is emblematic of the collective who have no permission to speak. Hers is an utterance audible solely to those who have lived in the hollow of deferred hope. Now she encounters what appears to be the grandest deception and suppression of truth. Jesus alone elevated her prominence and dignity to match man. They were to be joint heirs of the grace of life (Genesis 1:26, 1 Peter 3:7). She is crying because the Lamb of God has been taken away.

It is highly probable that Christian women gathered in sanctuaries, all over this world have been and are forced by the circumstances of their life to ask the very same question put forward by Mary Magdalene. Despite being choked, punched, beaten, kicked, and sometimes threatened with a weapon by their supposed Christian husbands, these believers cling desperately to the hope that Jesus can deliver them from their predicament. Contrary to accepted belief, these women quickly learn that they have been devalued even in the place of safety. Such persons have little reason to lift their hands in the sanctuary. So often these women are admonished to pray and to be even more submissive to their husbands. Hollow advice and benign neglect from those charged with protecting the flock, who themselves are under tremendous pressure to minimize and deny violence against women. The silence of the Church on violence against women ultimately places the Church in league with the perpetrators of injustice and against the victims she purports to exalt. Is it not incumbent upon the anointed of the Lord, namely the church, to deliver the gospel to the afflicted, bind the brokenhearted, proclaim