Welcome to the Bear Marriage Podcast, I'm Sheila Ray Gregoer from To Love Honor and Vacuum

dot com where we like to talk about healthy evidence-based biblical advice for your

marriage and sex life. It is October which means that it is Domestic Violence Awareness Month and I thought it would

be worth dedicating at least one podcast to the issues of abuse in the evangelical church.

I have actually heard some stats that abuse can be worse in Christian households,

not because more men abuse, but because in evangelical households women believe that they can't leave and they have to

submit to it and so we have this whole teaching around this which can actually perpetuate abuse and make it worse.

I need to say from the outset of this podcast that I firmly believe that divorce in the case of abuse is warranted. I do not think that you need to

submit to abuse or that you need to stay separated for the rest of your life and tied to a man who abuses you.

I will put some links to some posts where I do talk about that and talk about it as some people

have changed their mind about that and we'll be talking about that throughout the

podcast but we're not actually going to debate that too much and so I just want to

put that out there before we get to our guest just so that you know where I'm

coming from but this is something that I firmly believe.

I just think that we need to take abuse seriously. Jesus took abuse seriously, and we should

as well. You know, it was interesting when we did the research for the Good Girls Guide to Great Sex,

one of the questions that we asked was, do you believe that the only biblical reason for divorce

is adultery, as a new can't divorce for abuse? for divorce as an abuse.

And 25% of women say that they agree with that currently

and 35% say that they are being taught that currently

by their church or by Christian media.

And so this is still something which is widely believed and I do think that we need to do something about that.

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