JABbering Stooge

Rick Warren may have hoodwinked his followers into thinking that he has a direct personal hotline to God, but he sure as hell doesn’t have a direct personal hotline to civilized human relationships:

Biblical Battered Wife Syndrome: Christian Women and Domestic Violence
Although Rick Warren’s Saddleback church teaches women that physical abuse is not grounds for divorce, there is a growing literature for evangelical women — by their peers — that shows women how to get out of an abusive marriage, while remaining in the church.

What is a good enough reason for divorce? Well, according to Rick Warren’s Saddleback church, divorce is only permitted in cases of adultery or abandonment — as these are the only cases permitted in the Bible — and never for abuse.

As teaching pastor Tom Holladay explains, spousal abuse should be dealt with by temporary separation and church marriage counseling designed to bring about reconciliation between the couple. But to qualify for that separation, your spouse must be in the “habit of beating you regularly,” and not be simply someone who “grabbed you once.”

“How many beatings would have to take place in order to qualify as regularly?” asks Jocelyn Andersen, a Christian domestic violence survivor and advocate, author of the 2007 book Woman Submit! Christians and Domestic Violence, an indictment of church teachings of wifely submission and male headship. As she sees it, by convincing women that leaving their relationships is not an option, these teachings have laid the ground for a domestic violence epidemic within the church.

[…]

There are more blatant examples of excusing abusive male authority among stricter proponents of complementarianism and submission theology. In June 2007, professor of Christian theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Bruce Ware told a Texas church that women often bring abuse on themselves by refusing to submit. And Debi Pearl, half of a husband-and-wife fundamentalist child-training ministry as well as author of the bestselling submission manual, Created to Be His Help Meet [More like, “Created to Be His Punching Bag/Fuckmeat!” — Ed.], writes that submission is so essential to God’s plan that it must be followed even to the point of allowing abuse. “When God puts you in subjection to a man whom he knows is going to cause you to suffer,” she writes, “it is with the understanding that you are obeying God by enduring the wrongful suffering.”

This is just one more data point for the contention that Christianity (as practiced by its fundamentalists) is only slightly more civilized than Islam (as practiced by its fundamentalists), and that minuscule edge is only by virtue of having had a longer period of time in which to learn basic human diginity.