Craving safety they can’t find at home with their husbands, some abused Mennonite and Amish women turn to their churches and its leaders for help, only to feel victimized again.
Their plea for help comes after months or years of intense belittling, rages and terrorizing incidents, even though they have done everything they can to make their marriages better.
Esther waited seven years to talk to her ministers, long after her husband had struck her during their honeymoon, cracked her rib and bruised her arm numerous times. Sometimes she sat on the couch, paralyzed with fear as she waited for her husband to come through the door, not knowing if he would hug her or hit her.
“He (her minister) had me believing it was all my fault - if I worked harder or managed better. What they do is gradually wear you down more and more until you have no self-confidence left,” Esther said.
It’s extremely demoralizing, Esther and other women in similar straits said, to listen to church leaders tell them to be better wives.
Mary Boll, for several years a member of a support group for abused Mennonite women, said she has heard many variations on the same theme from women who had gone to their ministers for help.
“Maybe you need to pray more or maybe you need to try to be more submissive or what did you do to provoke him?” she said. “Well, couldn’t you try to be a little more agreeable, which reinforces what the husband says, which is, ‘You have to submit to me.’’
Several women said church leaders instructed them to give their husbands more sex so they would stop being abusive. One woman was advised to initiate sex whenever her husband flew into a rage. Another was told, after she had separated from her abusive husband, that she should just buy a new nightie.
“If you can get two people under the same roof having sex, you have a marriage,” said one abuse victim, describing her view of the Mennonite perspective. She said she was made to believe the woman’s perspective was inconsequential.
No wonder, then, that women feel trapped, Boll said, when her husband and her minister are both telling her to be more submissive. Where does she turn?
A Mennonite woman named Lorraine said one bishop simply wouldn’t believe her or her husband when they told him of her husband’s abusive behavior. When her husband admitted it, the bishop threw back his head and laughed.
“ ‘It’s so noble of you to admit to something you did not do in order to cover for your wife’s behavior’,’’ Lorraine remembers the bishop telling her husband. She said her husband later tried to stand up in church and confess, but the bishop refused to allow it.
Most of the churches they later attended chose to support her husband, who began to defend himself by saying that Lorraine overexaggerated the incidents, even though reports from a psychologist, doctor and psychiatrist documented the abuse.
“I really think my marriage would be together if it were not for the Mennonite church. They kept telling him, ‘Don’t listen to her’,’’ Lorraine said.
‘Till death do you part’
The lack of empathy abused women feel isn’t because church leaders don’t try to help.
Some ministers are willing to climb into the trenches with husband and wife to work out difficulties. They spend long hours counseling couples, responding to crises in the middle of the night, trying to help in any way they can.
Miriam’s church leaders tried to help her and her husband, prior to his arrest for raping her. They appointed two couples, one to work with Miriam and one to work with her husband, Allen, once a month.
Eventually, the intervention fell apart, a church leader said, because Miriam and Allen both felt their mentoring couples were biased against them.
At various times, church leaders supported Miriam’s insistence that she and her husband consult professional counselors or church-related counselors, but Allen seldom stayed long.
“This (joint counseling) has happened many, many times throughout the years, but it’s never done anything because he would just get angry,” said a source close to the situation.
Allen said church leaders listened to his wife, but not to him. They blamed him instead, and professional counselors told them to separate. “I got tired of that,” he said.
Victims in the Plain community agreed that major problems with church leaders erupted when all attempts at intervention failed, and the victim realized she could no longer comply with their leaders’ attempts to hold the marriage together.
Esther separated from her husband after 15 years of physical, verbal and emotional abuse that culminated in his attempt to strangle her. When church leaders asked her to reconcile with her husband, Robert, she drew the line.
“I wanted to cooperate with all these people, but I just couldn’t, from the middle of my bones out. Do you know what it’s like to be afraid every day, and all of a sudden you don’t have to be?”
Robert chose not to comment, but church leaders said he had confessed his sins and admitted he was wrong. He wanted to try over again, and they believed he could be trusted.
“We pleaded with her: ‘Please just try it,’” said one leader. Just go half-days, go out on dates. Let him start from the beginning, they urged. She refused.
“I kept talking to the ministry, and there wasn’t enough words in the English language to make them understand what it is like to live in fear all the time,” Esther said.
Leaders said she wasn’t “forgiving her debtors,” like the Bible says you should, “therefore, we can’t support her thinking.”
As a result, Esther was refused communion, she said, but her husband was not.
Denying church membership and participation in communion, withholding financial support, and shunning are all church disciplinary measures used against abused women who have refused to remain in their marriage.
Miriam’s church shunned her after she allowed her family to take her to the police and to the hospital after her husband raped her for the last time.
She cannot eat with or help her children or anyone else in the church, unless she promises, on bended knee &tstr; before her husband, the congregation and the Lord &tstr; not to call the police again and to submit to whatever her husband would have her do.
“All they say is, ‘Just come back to church and do what he wants and everything will be all right,’” said a source, who asked not to be identified. “That would be like letting a bear out of the cage.”
As it is, the source said, the shunning protects Miriam from her husband, because he isn’t allowed to touch her as long as she is shunned. However, the church requires him to live with her or he also will be shunned. He lives upstairs; She lives downstairs.
In spite of the urging of some relatives and friends, Miriam won’t leave him, the source said, because she wants full fellowship with her family and church. She wants the church to help her be safe.
A church leader said the church can’t keep her any safer than the law can &tstr; both of which rely on the offender’s willingness to behave. Still, she is obligated to honor her marriage vows, “till death do us part.”
Money is also a powerful weapon some churches use to try to hold abusive marriages together.
Some victims report that church leaders encouraged their husbands to withhold child support and medical payments, refuse to comply with visitation, and stall or instigate legal processes, which deplete them of money so they’ll have to move back home.
Lorraine said she and her three children lived on $14,000 a year, while neighbors, family and church members gave thousands of dollars to oversees mission. Churches typically cut off financial support for the victim if she leaves the marriage, because that usually means leaving the church too.
Individuals in the congregation also pressure the victim to return to the marriage by avoiding her, confronting her with threats of eternal damnation, disregarding her children’s needs and outright harassment.
“There were many times when total strangers blessed me, when the church couldn’t give me a kind word,” said Lorraine. “That’s what kept the children’s faith in God and people intact.”
Women are harassed to their breaking point by the “Mennonite Mafia,” as Lorraine calls the united effort to break a woman so she is forced to comply with a church expectation. Then when the women go bankrupt, adopt a “worldly lifestyle,” become abusive or check themselves into a psychiatric unit, the church can stand back and say, “See, that’s what happens when they leave the church,” she said.
The best revenge an abused Mennonite or Amish woman can have is to survive, Lorraine said. But the effect of the church’s punishment and blame and their husband’s abuse is almost more than women can take.
“Nothing in my life prepared me for what I am doing today. I don’t have the mental, emotional or spiritual energy to do what I am doing,” said Catherine. She feels ostracized by the conservative Mennonite church for getting a divorce, even though her husband admitted to having sex with prostitutes, embezzling money and committing other sexual indiscretions.
“Would I take my life? No,” Catherine said. “Do I understand why people do? Yes.”