Christian husbands might not be violent brutes

Conversations :: View Forum - Religious Studies

I regret that I cannot supply a link to the article ("Religious Studies: From family to community, two professors research the role of faith.") from the October 2005 issue of Arts & Sciences, alumni magazine of UVa, but it is not on the web. The link is to a comment forum on the alumni website. The article discusses the separate work and books of two UVa profs.

First, we have the book "Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands" by W. Bradford Wilcox, assistant professor of sociology. Prof. Wilcox studied three groups of husbands and fathers - evangelicals with traditional views on gender and family roles, mainline Protestants with more egalitarian views, and those with no religious affiliation - with respect to their relationships with their wives and children.

Among the findings that Wicox says have surprised his colleagues and journalists is "that churchgoing evangelical family men have the lowest rates of domestic violence of any major religious or secular group in the United States." This is so in spite of the fact that such men are stricter disciplinarians and do less housework than other husbands.

Wilcox finds that women evaluate the quality of their marriages less by perceived equality with their husbands or shared domestic chores and more by how much time their husbands spend meeting the emotional needs of the family. Churchgoing evangelical husbands do more of this "emotional work" which is one of the lesser appreciated results of the work of organizations like Promise Keepers and Focus on the Family.

As Wilcox puts it, in their pursuit of strong, traditional families - stable two-parent households, delaying sex until marriage, etc. - these men have resorted to "progressive strategies." Thus, the ideal of male servant-leadership produces husbands and fathers who are more inclined than their liberal or secular counterparts to do the hard and time-consuming work of actually tuning in to the emotional needs of their wives and children.

The second work examined in this article is "The Beloved Community" (the title is a quote from a 1956 speech by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.) by Charles Marsh, professor of religious studies. Marsh, a white man who grew up during the civil rights struggles as the son of a Baptist minister in Mississippi, describes his work as reclaiming the role of of faith in informing the struggle for social justice and the care of the poor and oppressed.