c. 2004 Religion News Service
WASHINGTON _ The less they attend church, the more likely evangelical husbands and fathers will physically abuse their spouses and children, says author and University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox.
In a new book, “Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands” (University of Chicago Press, $20 paperback), Wilcox examines the familial behaviors of evangelical men with different religious practices as shown in three large-scale surveys taken in the early 1990s. Among those behaviors is the frequency of physical abuse.
“What we find is the lowest rate of reported domestic violence in the early 1990s is among active evangelical husbands,” Wilcox said. By “active,” he means husbands who attend church regularly.
Wilcox cites data from the National Survey of Families and Households that indicated 2.8 percent of active evangelical Protestant husbands commit domestic violence, compared to 7.2 percent of nominal evangelical husbands _ those who attend church once or twice a year or not at all.
The survey also found that active evangelicals spend more time on parenting and working to fulfill the emotional needs of their wives and children than do nominal evangelicals.
Wilcox argues in his book that “religious community” culture “domesticates” men, making them more attentive to the emotional needs of their wives and children even though the study also shows such men do less of the housework.
John P. Bartkowski, professor of sociology at Mississippi State University, has studied the evangelical community extensively, and agrees with Wilcox. He said that in many cases the male peer group in a church serves to keep fathers and husbands in line, reminding them of their responsibilities.
“Men often have very frank conversations with one another about their marital relationships in a way that would _ outside evangelical churches _ be seen as inappropriate, that would be seen as `my private business; nobody else should be checking into that,”’ Bartkowski said.
The focus on men is not an accident.
“One of the things that been recognized is that men are the weak link oftentimes in family life. To strengthen that link, there’s been the focus on making men more attentive to their wives and to their children,” Wilcox said.
In 1998, the Southern Baptist Convention issued a statement declaring that wives should be submissive to their husbands, the rightful heads of households. Many observers challenged the claim, fearing the promotion of male dominance would lead to increased rates of domestic violence.
But Russell Moore, dean of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., said the statistics in Wilcox’s book show that a hierarchical family structure with men at the top fosters a more harmonious family life.
“I think you have a lot of secular scholars surprised by this data, because the very fathers who hold to traditional gender roles are also the ones who seem to be so committed to their wives and their children,” Moore said.
Since the 1970s, evangelical Protestants have felt that the traditional family was under threat from feminism and the sexual revolution. Their alarm produced a host of pastoral initiatives to shore up the family.
“Southern Baptists are increasingly concerned about a meltdown in American families, and so there is more intentional preaching in our churches about what it means to be a husband, what it means to be a wife, what it means to be a parent,” Moore said.
Wilcox and Moore disagree on whether the Southern Baptist statement of male headship might explain the much higher incidence of domestic abuse among nominal evangelicals.
“Nominal evangelicals may take that (Southern Baptist) message to legitimate their own bad behavior, but the active evangelicals take that message as a guide for what a good husband tries to be _ like Christ _ to his wife,” Wilcox said.
But Moore said, “I really do not think that you have abusive husbands in a large-scale fashion providing theological justification for their behaviors.”
DEA/PH END KING
