Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 39:1 (Winter 2025)
Article: The Wife As A Training Ground: Complementarian Theology And Coercive Control
Author: Bethany Jantzi

PP 39:1 (Winter 2025) p. 25

The Wife As A Training Ground: Complementarian Theology And Coercive Control

Bethany Jantzi

Bethany Jantzi holds an MSc in the Psychology of Coercive Control. She believes that every person has the right to live free from manipulation, abuse, and coercion. Her research explores high control groups and the weaponization of theology as a form of coercive control against women.

Our theology has real life implications. The way that Christians read Scripture and apply it matters greatly. Complementarian teachings hold to a gender hierarchy in marriage in which husbands are appointed by God to lead with wives responding with willing submission. This is fundamentally different from the egalitarian viewpoint of biblical equality and mutual submission. What if these complementarian teachings foster an environment in marriage that jeopardizes women’s autonomy? What if the way complementarians frame submission and headship replicate the main dynamics present in an abusive relationship? What if complementarianism operates as a spiritualized form of coercive control that reduces wives to a training ground for their husbands’ spiritual and leadership development?

As a believer who is concerned with the implications and consequences of how Scripture is interpreted, I find it striking how the mindset of a domestic abuser is one that can be given spiritual cover within complementarianism. While complementarians profess to protect and honor women, I question how this theology plays out in everyday life.

The field of psychology has made substantial and critical contributions helping us understand domestic abuse. The research on domestic violence has long pointed to an attitude of entitlement as a cornerstone of an abuser’s mindset.1 Adherence to traditional gender roles is a related factor that correlates with elevated levels of abuse.2 Men are socialized to believe that having control is a large part of what it means to be a man. Further, they are conditioned to believe that they are entitled to be in control.3 Boys are exposed to social and cultural messages that normalize women’s abuse and male control over women.4

Men who abuse often do so to prop up an insecure sense of self. While men do experience control and abuse from their female partners, men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of abuse where their female partner experiences severe physical violence and chronic fear.5 This gender divide is even more clear in cases of domestic homicide which is considered...