When Praying Isn’t Enough: Religion, Prejudice And Abuse -- By: Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen

Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 08:3 (Summer 1994)
Article: When Praying Isn’t Enough: Religion, Prejudice And Abuse
Author: Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen


When Praying Isn’t Enough: Religion, Prejudice And Abuse

Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen

Dr. Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen is a faculty member of Eastern College, in the Department of Psychology and also the Center for Christian Women in Leadership. She is author of Gender and Grace (InterVarsity Press, 1990) and After Eden: Facing the Challenge of Gender Reconciliation (Eerdmans. 1993). both of which may be ordered through the CBE Book Service.

I am a social psychologist with particular interests in cross-cultural psychology and in the psychology of gender. I am also a Calvinist Christian who affirms that the themes of creation, fell, and redemption are at work simultaneously in the lives of all Christians, and that because of this there is no area of life — including our faith life, our family life, and our civic life — that is guaranteed to be free of distortion.

As I examine the interrelatedness of religion, prejudice and abuse, I am aware mat abuse—whether physical, sexual or psychological — is a profoundly gendered concept The majority of abusers are male and the majority of victims are women and children.1 And prejudice — the unjustifiably negative attitude toward a group and its members, with supporting beliefs, emotions and behavioral predispositions —has both cross-cultural and gender implications, since the targets of prejudice are typically members of a less-powerful cultural, ethnic or gender group.2

However, it is difficult to expose the relationship between religiosity and prejudice in a time when admitting to prejudice has become socially unacceptable. And if anything, it has been harder to get an accurate picture of physical, sexual or emotional abuse among religious populations, because abuse is often claimed not to exist among such populations.

In addition, abuse (unlike prejudice) mostly takes place within the confines of a domestic unit, and we live in a culture which has long defended both a public/private dichotomy and also a hierarchically gendered public/private dichotomy. A man’s home, in this ideology, is his castle — both in the sense of being insulated from external interference, and in the sense of being his domain, over which his word is rule. Sometimes this is justified by the notion that the family is like a “little church,” and the husband/father is God’s priest or representative within the unit, and therefore that defying him is tantamount to defying God.

Now although I personally support a theology of mutual submission between spouses, it needs to be said that a theology of male headship does not necessarily open the door to domest...

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