290 Mary Jo Neitz
of Canada. Issues of violence against women are among the most significant feminist
issues of our time with ramifications for the life chances of individual women, and
importance for academic debates about how we conceptualize family and formulate
our critiques of patriarchal power.
Combining quantitative analysis of surveys and intensive interviews, Nason-Clark
has studied battered women, pastors, transition house workers, and church women in
evangelical and liberal Protestant churches.
InThe Battered Wife: How Christians Confront Family Violence, Nason-Clark begins
by listening to the voices of abused women. Their faith can be a cultural resource that
helps abused women heal. Nason-Clark explores how conservative Christian women
face problematic teachings such as the celebration of the intact family, the glorification
of suffering, and an emphasis on forgiveness. This can be exacerbated when the faith
community is separated from the secular world. Still Nason-Clark reports that evangel-
ical women do not themselves see their faith as a liability. Their Christian community
is important to them, and their faith helps them cope (1997).
When Nason-Clark turns to look at the pastors it is from the location of women,
asking how is it that the pastors contribute to the relations of ruling. Ninety-eight per-
cent of pastors in the study had experience in counseling women who had marital
problems. In cases of repeated physical violence, pastors condemn the violence. In no
cases did pastors suggest that women return to the abuser. But pastors are reluctant to
see a marriage terminated until all sources of help have been exhausted. They underes-
timate the extent of violence in their communities and have less knowledge about the
impact of male violence on women, tending rather to focus on the harm that is done
when a woman leaves the family. Pastors also fail to understand women’s economic
vulnerability in the family. Nor do they see how women are disadvantaged in the labor
market. The clergy tended to see abuse as a spiritual issue related to men’s lack of spir-
itual growth. What distinguishes clergy from other counselors is the importance they
place on maintaining the family unit and their excessively optimistic belief that men
can stop the violence.
Nason-Clark also reveals the largely unseen work of church women. Although out-
side of the public domain and largely invisible – even to their own pastors – Nason-Clark
finds that these women see the suffering of other women and want to do something
about it. They are quick to provide comfort and slow to criticize (2000: 362–3). While
church women share the belief that family life is “enshrined with sacred significance,”
for many this belief fed their distress that church and community offered so little to
families in crisis (1997: 130–1). Some of them choose to work with community agencies,
despite the tensions between secular and religious cultures.
Nason-Clark’s work speaks to several audiences, academic and nonacademic, church
people and secular feminists in the battered women’s movement. Her project is one that
“breaks the silence.” To church people, her message is that battering, not divorce, de-
stroys abusive marriages. To the feminists, she argues that abuse, not religion, degrades
women.
Cheryl Townsend Gilkes: Black Women in Church and Community
Cheryl Townsend Gilkes’s work is exemplified by her recently published collection of
essays,“If it wasn’t for the women...”: Black Women’s Experience and Womanist Culture