Facts go missing in ABC report on ‘violent Christians’

The ABC report by Julia Baird and Hayley Gleeson on religion and domestic violence has come under heavy fire, and for good reason. It is illogical, unfair and quite possibly inaccurate.

It contends that Christians have a major problem with domestic ­violence and that the church is “enabling and concealing” abuse in marriages across Australia. It offers one harrowing story after another to spotlight failings on the part of Christian husbands, clergy and church counsellors. Baird and Gleeson leave us with no doubt that ordinary believers and clergy around the nation have acted in ways that contravene basic Christian teachings about marital love and public justice. They are to be commended for underlining horrid failures on the part of lay and clerical leaders, as well as churches, when it comes to addressing domestic violence.

But in telling these stories, and in underlining their concerns with conservative Christian doctrines regarding male leadership in the home and church, the reporters paint a relentlessly negative picture of the influence that Christianity has on domestic violence. In so doing, they and the ABC fail to treat their subject fairly.

On the one hand, the church is charged with “both enabling and concealing (domestic violence)”. Indeed, the article is replete with stories of clerics saying or doing stupid, malevolent or negligent things related to abuse. For instance, they report that an Anglican rector, David Ould, said in 2015 that “it might be ‘a godly wise choice’ for women to stay with abusive husbands” given biblical teachings about female submission (he has since recanted).

But it also states: “Research shows that the men most likely to abuse their wives are evangelical Christians who attend church sporadically.” Here, they are draw­ing on my research on religion and American marriages (they neither contacted me nor mentioned me in the story, even though they relied heavily on my empirical findings). They speculate that it’s the kind of men “who are often on the periphery (of church life), in other words, who sometimes float between par­ishes or sit in the back pews”, who are most likely to abuse. That’s not the full story, if they are basing this claim on my research. In my study of the nominal evangelical husbands who were most abusive, I found that it was evangelical Protestant men who infrequently or never attended church who were most violent.

How do you blame Australian churches for a big domestic violence problem if it is men who ­infrequently or never attend church who have the highest likelihood of being violent? How would bad Christian preaching, teaching or counselling be a major factor in spousal abuse if the worst abusers are rarely or never in the pews? It doesn’t follow.

Indeed, what may be happening in the real world is that churches and religious institutions actually reduce the odds that husbands or wives abuse one ­another. On average, messages about love, forgiveness and fidelity may actually make for better husbands and wives, especially when they are reinforced by a community of believers that is struggling to live out values and virtues generally supportive of strong marriages.

Indeed, in the US, the evidence suggests relig­ious attendance ­reduces the odds of domestic violence. Work by University of Texas sociologist Christopher ­Ellison shows that husbands and wives are less likely to report they are abusive if they attend weekly; they are also less likely to report they have been abused if they are part of a church community. My research indicates couples report significantly higher quality relation­ships if they attend church together.

The point is not to suggest that abuse is not present in the church in Australia, or that lay and clerical leaders have not made big mistakes in addressing abuse. Abuse, and failures to adequately address it, can be found throughout the nation — including the church.

But it is to suggest that the ABC story completely ignores the possibility that churches and ­religious institutions may be having some positive role in ­reducing the prevalence of domestic violence among their active adherents. Instead, the story fails the basic journalistic test of fairness by presenting an almost completely negative picture of Christian approaches to domestic abuse, one that does not square with the evidence that church­going couples, in America at least, appear to be less likely to suffer domestic violence and more likely to enjoy happy marriages.

The ABC reports that this article was based on a year-long investigation. So they had a year to get this right.

They could have analysed existing ­national surveys, worked with ­serious scholars to conduct quantitative, nationally representative research on religion and domestic violence in Australia, or even fielded their own survey of Australian couples. But Baird and Gleeson, and their bosses at the ABC, did none of this hard work. ­Instead, they relied largely on ­research done in the US to make sweeping and illogical claims about religion and domestic violence in Australia.

So we really know nothing about how common domestic ­violence is among Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Buddhist and secular Aussies, what role relig­ious attendance plays in increasing or reducing the odds of abuse in Australia, or whether Australian clergy do a better or worse job of counselling abuse victims than other important figures in victims’ lives — such as psychologists and psychiatrists. That the reader is left so ignorant of the basic facts is perhaps the most scandalous and disappointing aspect of the ABC’s year-long investigation.

Domestic violence is a horrible thing. Better to face all the facts squarely than to paint a relentless negative, distorted and possibly inaccurate portrait of one group’s record on abuse. Without the truth about religion and domestic violence in Australia, it is impossible to figure out who and what to focus on in the struggle against it.

W. Bradford Wilcox is a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and senior fellow of the Institute for Family Studies.