I can't tell you her name or how I know her. This is because she is still living with her husband despite years of emotional and physical abuse. He's cheated on her and cleaned out their bank account to spend on drugs, pornography and online gambling. She left him briefly after a young girl accused her husband of molestation, but she went back to him after a week. Why? I asked her.

She told me that a woman spoke at their church a couple weeks before. The speaker explained how her husband used to be violent, but she didn't leave him because she knew that God's plan for a marriage was that it should last forever. Once, the husband's violence put their baby in the hospital. When he saw what he'd done, he repented and was never violent again.

"That's why I went back," the woman told me. "What if it doesn't end?" I asked. But the woman didn't answer. The conversation was over.

According to the Department of Justice, almost one-quarter of Americans were raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner or date at some time in their lifetime. Jocelyn Andersen, a Christian domestic violence survivor and author of Woman Submit! Christians & Domestic Violence, argues that the Church’s teachings on women and submission have given rise to an epidemic of domestic violence among Christians. In her book Quiverfull, journalist Kathryn Joyce argues that the Christian belief system, which focuses on women's submission and the headship of men, encourages the abuse of women. In his book Domestic Violence, What Every Pastor Needs to Know, Al Miles reveals that the theological training and beliefs given most clergy can actually contribute to increased violence and abuse of the victim. Christianity, according to some, is the problem. Here are three women from different Christian backgrounds who share their own stories and answer the question, "Do the Church’s teachings sometimes cause domestic violence?"

Christina
Christina Hernandez ministers to young women at a nonprofit called House of Hope. She loves talking about her faith and spent several years in South America working as a missionary, but that was after her divorce. "I wasn't raised in the Church," Hernandez says. "I became a believer when I was a senior in high school and started attending what I would call a conservative fundamental Christian church." Hernandez loved the church, she found the people there to be supportive and loving, and it was through that church that she also found her now-ex-husband. Hernandez says: "I was led by him to believe that he was a Christian and he loved the Lord and that we were going the same direction in our lives. And we got married, I was 21 and he was 23, but I thought this was where God was leading us."

After they got married, everything changed. Only days into their honeymoon, Hernandez didn't recognize the man she had married. "I started to see that he was living a double life. He had his external life where he was a good Christian guy, where he put on a smile and did all of those things, but behind closed doors he became very controlling and very manipulative and very hateful to the church … behind their backs. ... Everyone else thought he was this great guy and everyone loved him. He had a very charming personality, he was very winning and that's what I fell in love with. The man belongs in Hollywood—he was very convincing."

Her husband's duplicity frightened her. At church, he was warm and friendly, but when they got home, he was violent. "He would break things and punch doors and punch through windows, but he never hit me,” she says. “Most of the abuse was psychological and controlling. He alienated me from my family and my friends. He felt that I belonged at home."

Unlike Hernandez, her husband was raised in the Church and, she says, his family situation may have contributed to his abusive nature: "He was raised watching his parents. The dad was very controlling and called all the shots, and his mother just went along and kept the peace. That's how he thought it should be."

As her husband spiraled and the abuse got worse, Hernandez became depressed. "I just thought this was my new reality, I [was] going to have to be this Stepford Wife,” she says. “Do the right things, go through the motions, but I couldn't feel anything, and outside I still felt like I had to put on a smile and be what I thought was a good Christian wife. It was all twisted in my mind; I don't believe that this is what the Bible has to say."

Leaving her husband wasn't an option. "I just wanted to take my own life,” she says. “I didn't see any other way out."

Hernandez appealed to the leadership of her church, and while they seemed sympathetic, they offered no help. Hernandez recalls once when she tried to visit her sister, her husband forbid her to leave and physically stopped her from walking out the door. Hernandez went to her church again and got them to agree to let the couple go through a temporary separation. "The condition was that we were going to get Christian marital counseling together, with the point that we would get back together," she says. Hernandez stayed at the home of an elder, but things didn't improve. After a month, her husband told the church leadership that he needed her to go back to the house so he could prove that he'd changed. That's when the elders told her to obey her husband and return home.

"I knew what would happen," Hernandez says. "Things went back to the way they were before, if not worse." Once Hernandez returned home, her husband refused to go to a counseling session, so Hernandez went without him. There, in the office of the Christian counselor, Hernandez found an ally who helped her understand that the role of the woman is more than to submit and obey. "I really felt, all those years while I was still [married], that if I could just submit and obey well enough, everything would work out, that he would change. But that's not what happened."