Religious Abuse

I want to talk to a very specific person. Someone who is religious, sincerely religious, not performatively, but someone who genuinely believes. Someone who is deeply unhappy in their marriage and stays no matter what because their faith tells them to. I want to talk to you directly.

Church abuse is telling a woman to fight for her marriage while never once asking why she has spent years fighting for basic safety, honesty, and dignity inside it.

I am not writing this as someone who never believed. I was there. I sat in those pews. I understood the language, the sermons, the theology. I know exactly how it works from the inside. And that is precisely why I can say what I am about to say with full confidence.

I have watched women show up to church with bruises. Everyone in the room knew where those bruises came from. And the counsel they received, from leadership, from other women, sometimes from their own mothers, was to pray harder, submit more, endure better. That is not spiritual guidance. That is institutionalized abuse with a Bible verse attached to it.

The idea that God gave you this man is one of the most damaging beliefs a religious community can plant in a woman's mind. Think about what that actually means. It means your suffering is divine. It means your pain has a purpose you are not allowed to question. It means the person harming you was hand-delivered by God, which makes leaving an act of defiance against God himself. That is not theology. That is a trap. And it is a trap that keeps women inside dangerous situations while the community stands around calling it faithfulness.

Who told you it was your cross? Was it God? Did He come to you directly and say take this man, endure what he does to you, this is my plan for your life? Or did a religious system tell you that, a system built and largely led by people who have never had to be on the receiving end of what you are being asked to endure?

The pressure to keep a marriage together at any cost is not about protecting the family. If it were about protecting the family, the family would include the woman. Her safety would matter. Her mental health would matter. The damage being done to her children watching what she endures would matter. But in too many religious communities, the marriage as an institution matters more than the people inside it. The appearance of the family matters more than the reality of it.

Staying in an abusive marriage is not a virtue. It is not a testimony. It is not spiritual strength. In many cases it is a slow destruction of a person who has been convinced that her destruction is holy.

And to the women who finally said enough, who walked out after years of praying and hoping and trying and being told to try harder, you did not give up on your marriage. You stopped giving up on yourself. That is not failure. That is survival. And sometimes survival is the most faithful thing you can do.

God, if you believe in one, did not design you to be someone's punching bag, emotional or physical. That is not a cross. That is abuse. And abuse does not become acceptable because it happens inside a marriage and inside a church.

The institution should protect its people. When it protects itself at the expense of its people, it has already lost the plot.