Ending gender violence: An antiracist intersectional agenda for churches

Abstract

Churches can do better than offering hypocritical messages about tolerating gender-based intimate abuse and violence in family, church, and community life. Churches need culturally disruptive approaches that enable them to address this abuse and violence more consistently and systemically. Influential heteropatriarchal church values that promote deceptive theological generalizations about the inescapability of human suffering and sinfulness can merge with resonant values given expression in broader social and political practices that breed tolerance for the targeting of certain social groups for stigma and exclusion. This dynamic merger can inform our cultural understandings of gender, sexuality, and power in a manner that hinders our capacity to address the root causes of gender violence. For instance, the duplicitous ethos and practices of churches regarding gender-based intimate abuse and violence can mirror white supremacist denial that is also prevalent in US culture. Churches can, however, also play a unique role in helping to withdraw their own and other communal supports for the abuse and violence. Developing an antiracist approach can aid in producing the Christian moral imagination needed to awaken from a tolerance of everyday traumatic consequences for those who experience intimate violence and abuse or the ongoing threat of it, especially the most socially marginal community members.