Sitting Next to You in Church: A Victim of Domestic Violence?

Mississippi writer Kiese Laymon, born and reared in Jackson, has written in his memoir, Heavy, about his dislike of attending rural Concord Missionary Baptist Church on Sundays with his  grandmama:

...as hard as I tried, I couldn’t love the holy word coming from the pulpit. The voices carrying the word were slick and sure of themselves in ways I didn’t believe. The word at Concord was always carried by the mouths of the reverend, deacons, or other visiting preachers who acted like they knew my grandmama and her friends better than they did. Older Black women in the church made up the majority of the audience.

Women remain 70 percent of the membership in Black churches, according to Evelyn C. White’s book, Chain Chain Change. Those Black churches, as they were during the civil rights violence movement, remain strong influences in their communities. But Black churches never talk about the fact that more than 45 percent of all Black women experience some form of domestic violence during their lives, compared to 31.5 percent of all women. Black women are twice as likely to be killed by men than white women, and more than 90 percent of those Black women knew their killers--meaning they probably were their husbands or intimate partners. If Laymon’s grandmama wasn’t suffering domestic violence, chances are she knew a woman who was.

Many churches ignore domestic violence occurring within their congregations.

Granted, white churches have remained silent, too. Most seminarians are not trained to respond to  domestic violence, even though victims and abusers sit in every American church. Domestic violence is a sin as well as a crime. If churches decided to take it on, they could make an enormous difference.  Since Black women suffer domestic violence in numbers out of proportion to their roughly 6.9 percent of the U.S. population, why haven’t Black churches responded? 

“Black churches focus on keeping the family together, on forgiveness and following spiritual  practices,” says the Rev. Dr. Selina D. Carter, domestic violence survivor, clergy member, and activist. “Social services focus on a victim’s safety, meaning that the family will be separated.” So churches have no relationship with social services or domestic violence advocates, even  though “women in relationships with abusive men are silently sitting in plain sight” in pews or choir stalls.

Historically, Black men, Dr. Carter points out, have enjoyed little or no respect in the larger society or at work. They are more likely to find respect at home or church. So women often resign themselves to taking the brunt of their partners’ frustrations and not asking for help.

“I was one such woman,” Carter said.

Perpetrators, says Carter, misuse Scripture, especially Ephesians 5, verses 22 - 24, to excuse domestic violence, exonerate themselves, and control their partners. They don’t quote verses 25 - 28, in which husbands are exhorted to love their wives as themselves.

In Jackson, Bishop Ronnie C. Crudup Sr. is administrative bishop of the Fellowship of International Churches and chief bishop of the Mid-South Diocese. He also is senior pastor at New Horizon Church International, which he founded in 1987, and a respected religious leader in Mississippi. He says Black clergy are aware of the rise of domestic violence during the pandemic, and he and his fellow bishops have discussed it among themselves. But he says that “the pandemic has dampened our voices.” Churches are hard-pressed to “get our own messages out.”  

Lack of education about domestic violence, Carter says, is a major issue for all churches. There are resources that churches can use to begin educating themselves. Carter recommends that Black church leaders begin with Al Miles’ book, What Every Pastor Needs to Know About Domestic Violence, and Speaking of Faith: Domestic Violence Programs and the African American Church, a video partly shot in Greenville, Mississippi, from the Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American Community at the University of Minnesota. Carter herself has made four public service announcements, or PSAs, to raise Black churches’ awareness of domestic violence. One of them, On the Other Side of the Door, is available on YouTube.

 Ann Marie Cunningham is a Columbia University Lipman Fellow for 2020 who will be working with the Mississippi Center for investigative Reporting. She is a veteran journalist/producer and author of a best-seller. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Technology Review, The Nation and The New Republic. Contact her at amclissf@gmail.com.