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

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.