As a millennial living in Sydney, I am faced with an important choice: a house or my life. I’ve decided to choose the latter.

By Pat Seyrak

I’ve made a decision to retire early. I don’t mean at 55 or even 50 years old. I’m talking about hanging up my boots at the ripe age of 35 after a fulfilling, decade-long career.

While early retirement is not for everyone, I truly believe that becoming financially independent — that is, having the financial means to stop working if you choose to — is an achievable and worthwhile goal for most Australians with a decent-paying job.

My own yearning for financial independence has grown over time.

The inhuman waking hours and long days filled with hours of overtime has slowly eroded the feelings of satisfaction and accomplishment I get from my work.

More importantly, I feel that by working so much, I’m missing out on the rest of my life.

Challenging the status quo

Unlike my peers, buying a home is not a priority for me.

Contrary to many people my age, who are driven by ever-rising property prices and the fear of missing out, I wasn’t willing to mortgage myself to the neck.

Instead, I decided to invest in the share market to work towards my goal of early retirement.

My decision led to some raised eyebrows from friends and family.

My colleague Matt nearly choked on his coffee when I told him I had $250,000 in the share market. “That’s crazy,” he said.

But I’ll tell you what I think is crazy: spending 30 years of servitude paying off a mortgage, just to own a very expensive material possession, when I could be doing other things like spending time with my friends and family.

By buying income-producing assets such as shares, I will soon have enough income to make work optional.

By saving aggressively and investing, I plan to have $1,000,000 by the time I am 35. This will produce an income of about $40,000 per year for the rest of my life.

Now, that amount of money would not go far if I were to continue living in Sydney, one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world.

That’s why I have aspirations to live in other parts of Australia and the world.

Cities like Cairns, Adelaide, Ballarat or Hobart (just to name a few) offer extremely affordable real estate and idyllic lifestyles away from the constant rat race of the larger cities.

Slowly travelling through south-east Asia or South America can also be done at a far cheaper price than it costs to live in some of Australia’s large cities.

The cost of freedom

While many imagine a life of poverty on $40,000 a year or less, I have found that you can have a truly rich and fulfilling life by ensuring you spend your money on the right things.

Yearly upgrades to the latest iPhone and smashed avocado at the local café several times a week are out, while lots of outdoor time with friends and beautiful home cooked meals are in.

Being completely open and honest about these aspirations has meant that my friends and family know what my motivations are when I make decisions around spending.

I still remain social and see them regularly, giving myself a small social spending budget for meals out and other small incidental costs.

The key here is smart spending: I could waste one month’s social budget on one meal, or I could forego the fancy meal and have every weekend filled with day trips to places such as public pools, the beach, hiking spots or free outdoor cinemas.

None of this is much different to what a young couple would do to save a house deposit.

As with any plan there are risks…

Even with a very conservative strategy of withdrawals from my share portfolio to cover living expenses during retirement, I must admit there are still risks.

The prevailing risk is under-performing investments. The share market is an unpredictable beast in the short term.

Another risk is the possibility that I come to need or want to spend more on living expenses than I had planned.

If returns are not what I expect them to be or if I fall victim to lifestyle inflation, then I will need to adjust my plan to include more paid work and/or be more flexible with my spending.

I am content with the possibility of needing to work a bit longer or transitioning to a couple of days of casual work in a fun, low-stress job if I need to give my investments some time to grow.

Far from being the death knell of my retirement, these are challenges that I expect and am prepared to overcome by remaining flexible with my work and spending.

But what will you do with yourself?

While, I must admit, the prospect of getting my hands dirty in the garden at 8am on a weekday while everyone else is rushing to work is alluring, I don’t intend to drop everything once I reach my goal.

Juggling full-time work and child-rearing sounds painfully difficult and full of unfortunate compromises.

By getting the business of earning money out of the way early in life, I can focus 100 per cent of my energy on what will be my most important commitment: family and children.

Besides spending time with my family, I want to travel, learn a language and play music.

Hard work, achievement, productivity and contribution will always have an important place in my life. But it doesn’t always have to be for money.

I hope to do some meaningful work in retirement that’s not motivated by money. I’d like to volunteer and work on personal projects — but on my own terms, not those of my employer.

As Peter Adeney, who blogs about financial independence under the pseudonym Mr Money Moustache, points out:

“If you can free yourself from the need for money, you have no choice but to do work that is better for you, and better for the world … If you’re doing it for love instead of money, you’ll have no choice but to do a better job.”

It’s all too common to hear people who, at the end of their lives, regret working too much.

Like most, I don’t want to be one of those people. Unlike most, I’m willing to do something about it.

Pat Seyrak is a 30-year-old engineer working in Sydney. He writes about financial independence on his blog, Life Long Shuffle.

Why I decided to skip home ownership to retire at the ripe age of 35 was originally published in ABC News Australia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Six years after Gavin Larkin’s death, the memory of the movement’s founder is still being used as a guiding light.

By Caitlin Shea

As R U OK? Day rolled out for a third year across Australia in 2011, its founder Gavin Larkin was anything but OK.

He was days away from death, but still tracking the success of his fledgling suicide prevention movement from bed at his Sydney home.

“I’ve got Twitter on and Facebook,” Mr Larkin said on the day.

“It’s everywhere, so I’m very happy because it’s more important than me.”

His wish was for R U OK? Day to continue well beyond his death and, six years on, Australians have wholeheartedly embraced the concept of checking in on the welfare of each other.

The latest figures show 80 per cent of Australians are aware of the day of action and one in four of those have participated in an R U OK? Day-related activity.

But the phenomenon has also been a source of strength and comfort for his wife and children.

“This is the house that lives and breathes R U OK? and it’s incredible to see the community that R U OK? has built around us,” his daughter, Josie, said.

“It’s incredible to see what he dedicated the last few years of his life to still helping others.”

‘I don’t ever say it’s not fair’

The Larkin family has endured unimaginable loss over the past six years.

Two years after Larkin’s death from lymphoma, his 15-year-old son, Gus, died of a brain tumour.

Mr Larkin’s wife, Maryanne, said her family had suffered the “unthinkable” but were doing “pretty well considering”.

“I think outsiders look at it and think, ‘My God, if that happened to me, how would I get up everyday?’,” she said.

“I do have feelings like that some days; that it is so hard, but we’ve been able to cope, and I would say cope pretty well actually.

“Acceptance has been a big part of me being able to get through it.

“I don’t ever say, ‘it’s not fair’.”

R U OK? born from personal fear of suicide

Larkin set up R U OK? in 2009 as a personal project to honour his father, Barry Larkin, who took his own life in 1996.

Despite his successful and lucrative advertising career, Gavin Larkin feared he was heading down a similar path to his father.

“I should have been feeling on top of the world and I felt empty, I felt black, and it really scared me and I started to worry that I might do what my father did,” he said.

He came up with the concept of R U OK? Day, a national day of action to encourage people to reach out to others who may be struggling.

He used his marketing skills and high-profile contacts to get newspapers, television stations and a host of celebrities on board.

It was an instant success, but shortly after the first R U OK? Day, Larkin was diagnosed with stage-four lymphoma. Gus was diagnosed three weeks later.

“You could say, ‘Why me?’ and then you go, ‘Well why not me? What is it about us that’s so different or special?’,” Larkin said.

“Life is random and you’ve got to cop the good with the bad.”

Gus was equally accepting.

“Que sera,” he said. Whatever will be.

Gavin’s story ‘central’ to R U OK? movement

Six years after Gavin’s death, his wife Maryanne, 16-year-old daughter Josie and 12-year-old son Van are all still involved in the R U OK? movement.

Josie gives speeches for the organisation, and Ms Larkin and Van took part in the Conversation Convoy, a group of four bright yellow cars that toured Australia spreading the R U OK? message.

R U OK? chief executive Brendan Maher said Larkin’s personal story was central to the ongoing power of the movement.

“Gav’s never far away,” Mr Maher said.

“I often think, ‘What would Gav think about this?’, and I hope that he’d be happy with where we’re going.”

Everyone agrees Larkin would be thrilled to see how successful his suicide prevention movement has become.

“He would be very happy,” Ms Larkin said.

If you or anyone you know needs help:

• Lifeline on 13 11 14
• Kids Helpline on 1800 551 800
• MensLine Australia on 1300 789 978
• Suicide Call Back Service on 1300 659 467
• Beyond Blue on 1300 22 46 36
• Headspace on 1800 650 890

R U OK? Day: The true story behind the movement was originally published in ABC News Australia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Charlottesville is the birthplace of America’s eugenic laws.

By Natasha Mitchell for Science Friction

The recent rally by white nationalists and supremacists on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, has left Americans soul searching. But what they might discover in the history of their heartland is chilling.

During the protests white supremacists and alt-right members waved flags emblazoned with Nazi symbolism — visceral reminders of the hell that Jewish people and others endured under Nazi rule.

The violence culminated in the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, who was allegedly mowed down by a young neo-Nazi sympathiser in his car.

At face value, last month’s events were triggered by the planned removal of a Confederate statue, which for many black Americans symbolises the cruel apartheid of slavery.

But a little-known fact is that a key pillar of Nazi ideology found its foundation in Charlottesville decades before Hitler’s rise to power.

The birthplace of eugenics

Charlottesville is the birthplace of America’s eugenic laws.

These laws resulted in up to 70,000 people being sterilised against their will throughout the last century, in over 30 states. In men, this meant being given a vasectomy; for women it involved a hysterectomy or having your fallopian “tubes tied” or clamped.

Under the US legislation, people who were deemed feeble-minded, moronic, mentally deficient, psychologically or physically inferior were often incarcerated in institutions and then sterilised.

The medical labels used were many and varied, but the outcome was the always the same — enormous suffering, shame and loss.

Some survivors describe being told they were having their appendix out, only to find out, often years later, the real reason why they were never able to have children.

It’s no coincidence that victims were often people who were poverty-stricken, pulled out of school early, disabled, or prisoners. Women accused of promiscuity — unwed mothers or rape survivors — were targeted too.

Essentially anyone considered undesirable by the moral arbiters of the time and those wielding the scalpel were at risk.

Scientists believed that weeding out people from the gene pool would purify the human race to include only those with a robust biological heritage — and that this would benefit the economy.

They developed detailed pedigree charts, tools and measurement techniques to justify their claims.

And countless others climbed on board.

“I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done,” wrote former American president Theodore Roosevelt in 1914.

“Criminals should be sterilised and feeble-minded persons forbidden to leave offspring behind them.”

This very same thinking was what drove Hitler’s eugenic policies and atrocities, in his pursuit of an Aryan master-race during World War II. The extermination of millions of people was the Nazi’s horrific end point.

A shameful past

In 1906, Carrie Buck was born in Charlottesville and was to become the subject of one of the most notorious of US Supreme Court cases in American history, Buck v. Bell.

Carrie was placed in foster care as a child and her mother incarcerated in the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded.

When she was 16, by then effectively an indentured servant to her foster parents, Carrie was raped by their nephew and became pregnant.

Embarrassed, her foster family had her locked away in the same colony as her mother, and separated from her baby daughter Vivien. They falsely claimed Carrie was epileptic and “feeble-minded”.

What happened next remains a blight on America’s legislative history.

A powerful cohort of doctors, scientists and lawyers were wheeled in to mount a case against Carrie in an effort to demonstrate that she and her family members were a stain on society.

They wanted to create a eugenically fit and efficient human race, and they needed one convincing case study to prove why.

The case Buck v. Bell ended up in the highest court of the land.

It was rigged — the was evidence manufactured, and Carrie lost. She was sterilised against her will.

“Three generations of imbeciles are enough” was the ruling.

Eugenic sterilisation was considered to be constitutional and laws were subsequently rolled out across the country.

Generations later, survivors are still dealing with the legacy of those events.

It took decades for many laws to be repealed, and even longer for authorities to apologise and start to put in place reparation arrangements for those willing to come forward.

In Virginia that only happened last year.

Too little, too late for too many.

Some have died. Others live on in silent shame.

Misguided science

This is a story of misguided science and misappropriated power.

Scientists claim to be objective, neutral and to let their data do the talking — that’s the fundamental principle underpinning the scientific method — but the science they do, the questions they ask and conclusions they draw can often reflect the values of the time in which they live.

Perhaps most chilling is the way in which decision-makers latched onto the flawed science of eugenics and used it to justify systematic human rights abuses.

History has a habit of repeating itself, and Carrie’s legacy serves as a cautionary tale for how we translate developments in genetic science into social policy today.

The eminent scientific journal Nature, in a recent strongly worded editorial, argues against the use of science to justify prejudice.

“… the recent worldwide rise of populist politics is again empowering disturbing opinions about gender and racial differences that seek to misuse science to reduce the status of both groups and individuals in a systematic way,” it says.

Neo-Nazi thinking isn’t new to the streets of Charlottesville, or to America.

In fact, America led the way. And Hitler and his apparatchiks took notice.

Listen to part one and part two of Science Friction’s story on the history of eugenics.

A history of eugenics: America’s Nazi problem before Charlottesville was originally published in ABC News Australia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After a long break, ABC News is about to begin the latest chapter of its on-again, off-again relationship with comments.

What is it about comments? A mainstay of news websites for decades, those same news websites have been grappling with how to build positive commenting communities for just as long.

It’s like that whole Ross and Rachel thing. (For those unfamiliar with 90s sitcom Friends, here’s a quick primer).

NPR is the latest news org to call it quits. A year on from the decision to remove comments the public broadcaster says it is never ever, ever getting back together with comments (like, ever). (Or at least, has no plans to).

Recode, Reuters, The Week, Mic are among online publishers who reached ‘deal breaker’ stage, while Popular Science is ‘on-again’ after ditching comments a couple of years ago.

At the other end of the scale, The New York Times is hoping automation will allow it to open most articles for comment.

Decisions to ditch comments are often blamed on the rise of social media, Facebook in particular, as the go-to place for audience interaction.

Dig below the surface, though, and it’s often a case of resourcing. Building a community is difficult, and building the sort of community you want is even harder.

I love this 2012 quote from Trei Brundrett (then VP product and technology, now COO, Vox Media):

“A lot of media companies struggle with comments and moderating them because they think that they should just turn comments on and then they just hope that it will go well, or that they can throw some technology at it and somebody else will solve their problem. If you want to have high-quality conversation you have to cultivate it.”

He knows what he’s talking about. In 2012 (when that quote was taken) Vox Media’s network published 35,412,480 comments.

And it’s worth noting that Vox Media’s key properties — SB Nation, The Verge, and Polygon — are all still hosting comments, and that functionality hasn’t been outsourced to Facebook. (Although, The Verge did have ‘a break’).

So on the one hand there’s the opportunity to build a community of regular commenters who spend a lot of time on the site and create content that is valuable to everyone, even those who never leave a comment.

On the other, there’s the resourcing issue. How do you pay for it?

More than two years ago, ABC News decided we didn’t have technology to moderate comments efficiently.

Today, we’re launching a three-month trial of Livefyre comments.

We aim to:

• Offer comments on a wide selection of content, but with a focus on the stories that are generating the most interest on the ABC News site;
• Build a community of commenters interested in sharing their perspectives on the news of the day in a civil way;
• Highlight the best of this content and surface it for all ABC News readers, even if they are not commenters;
• Determine whether comments on our site are still valued, despite the rise of Facebook.

We’re not sure if we’re on the path to happily ever after but, just like Ross and Rachel, we’re going to give it our best shot.

If you have any questions, leave a comment!

Originally published at www.abc.net.au on September 6, 2017.

Are comments the ‘Ross and Rachel’ of news audience engagement? was originally published in ABC News Australia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Indigenous people have become a postscript to Australian history thanks to a belief in the superiority of white Christendom.

Analysis by Stan Grant

Who would have thought the mere suggestion that Captain Cook did not in fact discover Australia would be so controversial?

It seems to have taken some people by surprise, the idea that people were here for more than 60,000 years before the Endeavour dropped anchor.

What were we doing all that time, just waiting for white people to find us?

And to dare challenge this “discovery”; how impertinent. I can hear someone saying “know your place”.

It has certainly ignited a debate and that is a good thing. History is not dead, it is not past or redundant, it is alive in all of us: we are history.

Responding to the tearing down of racist monuments in the United States prompted me to ask questions about our history; the story we choose to tell ourselves.

And it is a choice. The French historian Michel De Certeau wrote of history as the writing of absence — a therapeutic exercise that fills in the gaps, that allows us to construct a story that suits our ends like artefacts arranged in a shopfront window.

An empty land with an empty past

Where the Americans appear consumed by race, we prefer silence.

There is a history in Australia of not wanting to talk about the darker parts of our shared past.

It is written in our DNA, it is buried in the soil.

When a nation is founded on a doctrine of terra nullius — literally empty land — then it becomes too easy to ignore the people of that emptiness.

We don’t have to reckon with the treatment of Aboriginal people because they are invisible. Indigenous people become a postscript to Australian history.

History itself becomes a hymn to whiteness.

This is what Captain Cook’s statue in Sydney’s Hyde Park tells us.

The inscription that Cook “Discovered this territory 1770” maintains a damaging myth, a belief in the superiority of white Christendom that devastated Indigenous peoples everywhere.

Where does it come from? In 1452 Pope Nicholas V sanctioned the conquest, colonisation and exploitation of all non-Christian peoples.

In 1493 after Christopher Columbus returned from his so-called discovery of America, Pope Alexander VI decreed that land not ruled by Christian kings was free to be claimed.

No-one mattered until a white man arrived

The idea of terra nullius was the law of whiteness, that anyone who did not worship Jesus Christ was less than human.

The doctrines of discovery and terra nullius have been demolished by the church, by our courts, by the United Nations.

The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues says the Discovery doctrine is the “foundation of the violation of their (Indigenous people) human rights”.

How in Australia do we maintain the ceremonial fig leaf of welcomes to country while a statue stands in the centre of our largest city proclaiming to the world that no one here mattered until a white person “discovered” the land?

That is the problem with Australia, a land of gestures and tokens with no substantial recognition of Indigenous peoples and our history, no treaties (the only Commonwealth country without one) and now a go-slow on constitutional reform that would give Indigenous peoples a voice in our founding document that was originally written to exclude us.

Earlier this month I attended the Garma festival and Indigenous forum for political, business, industry and cultural leaders on Yolngu country in northeast Arnhem Land.

Gumatj leader Galarrwuy Yunupingu opened the event in his language. These are, he said, Australian words.

They are the words of this land, connecting us to a deep past.

These are words for all of us.

My father has dedicated his life to saving and reviving our language — Wiradjuri — a language his grandfather was jailed for speaking.

Language, he says, does not tell you who you are, but where you are.

This is our heritage, all of us: Australians.

We cheat ourselves when we deny or diminish this rich history.

I want to believe in us as Australians. This is in so many ways an extraordinary country.

Cook is part of my story

I want to believe in “we” not “us and them”. But we means all of us.

Captain Cook is part of my story; an extraordinary seaman and navigator.

The songlines, dreaming and language of the first peoples should be cherished by all of us.

To non-Indigenous people I say that tradition is part of your heritage. That’s what Galarrwuy Yunupingu means; that’s my father’s dream.

Australia is founded on three grand stories: the First Nations, the British tradition and the richness of our migration story.

But it starts with us. We are not invisible.

Our frontier resistance warriors deserve a place on the war memorial wall of remembrance.

I should not have to cross a river named in honour of a man who wanted us exterminated.

This is not 1770 or 1901. This is not the first fleet or federation. This is 2017.

We have a voice, our lives matter.

After all, we discovered this country.

It’s a ‘damaging myth’ that Captain Cook discovered Australia was originally published in ABC News Australia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For Christian groups to claim the Bible speaks against same-sex marriage is simply a misreading of biblical values.

Opinion by Robyn J Whitaker, Trinity College

As Australia faces a postal survey on same-sex marriage, we are seeing a steady stream of articles arguing the Yes or No case.

Many on the No side are prone to citing the Bible or appealing to “biblical values”. But what does the Bible actually say about human sexuality and homosexuality in particular?

What follows represents a summary of critical biblical scholarship on the issue.

Critical biblical scholarship draws on a range academic disciplines including literary criticism, archaeology, history, philology, and social science to offer the most plausible, historically grounded interpretation of the Bible. It is not simply a matter of personal belief or citing official church doctrine.

Australian scholars are among leaders in the field when it comes to sexuality and the Bible. William Loader has written several books on the matter and this Anglican collection of essays is also excellent.

When it comes to homosexuality there are, at most, six passages of the Bible that are relevant. So what do these passages say?

Genesis 19 and Leviticus

The story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19 is well known. This is where the terms “sodomite” and “sodomy” originate, and it has long been associated with biblical condemnation of male homosexual sex. It is, however, actually about gang-rape.

In this story, the men of Sodom seek to rape two visitors (who are actually angels). Their host, Lot, defends them and offers them protection in his house, but offers his virgin daughters to be raped in their place.

It is a deeply problematic and complex story that warrants an article of its own, but what is clear is that sexual violence and rape is harshly condemned, and so God destroys the town with sulphur and fire.

Despite the linguistic history of the word “sodomite”, Genesis 19 has nothing to say about homosexuality or mutually consenting adults of the same gender expressing their desire and love.

Two of the laws of Leviticus (18:22 and 20:13) seem more pertinent. They call a man lying with another man instead of his wife an “abomination”.

We should note first that the imagined scenario is a married man committing adultery with another male. It is not describing what we would understand to be a sexual orientation.

We might also note the inherent sexism here: women apparently don’t have the same desire or their sexuality is deemed too insignificant to be worthy of comment.

Again, we need some context. Yes, this verse clearly condemns adulterous homosexual sex in calling it an “abomination” (to’ebah), but here are all the other things also called an “abomination” in the Bible:

• Egyptians eating with Hebrews;
• having an image of another god in your house;
• sacrificing your child to the god Molech;
• having sex with your wife when she is menstruating;
• taking your wife’s sister as a second wife; and
• eating pork.

Banned likewise is wearing mixed-fabric clothing, interbreeding animals of different species, tattoos, mocking the blind by putting obstacles in their way, and trimming your beard.

As you can see, there is quite an assortment of ancient laws, some of which seem to make good sense (such as no child sacrifice) and others of which the majority of Christians no longer keep (such as eating pork and wearing a wool-silk blend).

To claim one set as timeless truths while ignoring the others is patently hypocritical and goes against the grain of the text itself.

These two verses in Leviticus are the sum total of what the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) says about same-sex activities.

The New Testament

The remainder of the biblical references occur in the New Testament, written between approximately 50 and 110 CE in the context of the Roman Empire. The attitudes and norms of Graeco-Roman culture are critical in understanding these texts.

In Graeco-Roman society, there was an acceptance that men might be attracted to other men. Even if married (to a woman) and often prior to marriage, a wealthy man might have a young male lover or male partner.

In educational settings, several ancient authors comment on the male-male mentoring that often included pederasty (sex with boys).

The main ancient objection to male-male sexual activity was that one partner had to take the “woman’s role” of being penetrated. In a patriarchal society, to be masculine was to be the active partner, whereas to be passive was deemed feminine and shameful.

These attitudes find their way into the New Testament in various forms. 1 Corinthians 6:9–10, and 1 Timothy 1:10 list a wide group of people who will not “inherit the Kingdom” without changing.

Paul is using a standard list of vices here to make a wider rhetorical point.

Where some English translations might include “homosexuality” on this list, the translation is not that simple, which is why various English words are used (adulterer, immoral persons, prostitutes).

The Greek word malakoi in 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 means “soft” or “effeminate” and captures the Graeco-Roman distaste at a man taking a “female” role. In the Bible it is commonly used to describe fancy clothing, and outside the Bible was a term for cult prostitutes.

The word arsenokoites is rarer. Scholars have debated whether it refers to male prostitution or pederasty or something else. To translate it as “homosexual” is problematic for two reasons: it is unlikely Paul had any concept of sexual orientation and he was certainly not describing a committed adult relationship.

In Romans 1:26–27, Paul condemns people swapping out their usual partner for one of the same gender. He claims this is a result of idolatry and uses it as part of his argument for why one should only follow (his) God.

It is typical of the strong “them and us” rhetoric of the ancient world, serving a larger argument and is not a statement on sexuality per se.

As New Testament scholar Sean Winter summarises:

“Paul shares a stereotypical Jewish distrust of Graeco-Roman same-sex activity, but is simply not talking about loving partnerships between people with same-sex orientation.”

Considering the context

We need to put all this in perspective. These are six verses out of more than 31,000 verses or roughly 0.016 per cent of the text.

In contrast, the Bible contains more than 2,000 verses about money (and related issues of greed, wealth, loans, and property), and more than 100 specifically on one’s obligation to care for widows.

In other words, monitoring and proscribing human (homo)sexual activity is not a particular concern of the Bible when compared to the overarching demand for justice, economic equality, and the fair treatment of foreigners and strangers.

For certain Christian groups to make this the decisive Christian issue is simply a misreading of biblical values.

Lest readers think the Bible is against sexuality generally, there is an entire biblical book devoted to celebrating human sexual desire. Written in the style of a Mesopotamian love poem, the Song of Songs (sometimes called Song of Solomon), speaks positively of both female and male sexual yearning.

Serious Christians cannot ignore the Bible. They can, however, make sure that they interpret it with all the tools available to them, that they examine their own biases, and stop over-simplifying the issues.

The Bible offers a wide variety of marriage arrangements, many of which we no longer condone. It never condemns same-sex marriage, partly because it simply does not address the issue directly.

It does, however, give us an ethic to guide how we treat one another: an ethic based upon God’s generous love and a profound concern for justice.

Robyn J Whitaker is Bromby Lecturer in Biblical Studies at Trinity College and a lecturer at the University of Divinity.

This article was originally published in The Conversation

What does the Bible really have to say about same-sex marriage? was originally published in ABC News Australia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The debate goes beyond defining who can get married. The human rights to freedom of speech and freedom of religion are also at stake.

Opinion by Peter Kurti

The forthcoming postal vote on same-sex marriage is the plebiscite we had to have. The issue has become toxic for the Coalition.

A High Court ruling upholding the postal vote will clear the way for a vote in the Commonwealth Parliament — but only if the people give their say-so to same-sex marriage.

If the people, however, vote against changing the marriage law — or the High Court rules a postal vote plebiscite unlawful — the issue of same-sex marriage will remain stuck in thick mud with no plans for a fall-back conscience vote in parliament.

When politicians opt for a plebiscite to let the people “have their say”, they run the risk of being told things they don’t want to hear — just ask former British prime minister David Cameron.

A plebiscite is a high-risk strategy that ought to have a very limited place in a parliamentary democracy.

After all, democracy does not mean government by the people; it means simply that the people get to choose their government.

A broader problem than religion

A lot is at stake in the coming weeks as the respective Yes and No campaigns get underway, each side knowing that this highly charged issue still threatens to destabilise national politics — and political careers.

If “balance” is likely to be one key feature of the campaign over the coming weeks, another feature will certainly be “religious freedom”. This concerns the extent — if any — to which the convictions of people who have a religious objection to the redefinition of marriage will be protected by the law.

Senator Dean Smith’s proposed Marriage Act Amendment Bill, which he released earlier this month, only offered protections for ministers of religion and civil celebrants who opted not to marry same-sex couples.

But as Sydney’s two archbishops, along with other senior religious figures and prominent secular critics, quickly pointed out, much broader protections are needed if the law on marriage is changed. Freedom of religion extends far beyond the walls of a church or a synagogue.

Schools, charities, and other faith-based not-for-profits, as well as ordinary business people such as bakers, florists, and photographers who wish to uphold the traditional meaning of marriage need to be protected from discrimination and attack if the law on marriage does change.

Further, there should be consideration of the views of those who do not hold religious beliefs but also are not in favour of same-sex marriage.

Our failure to protect religious liberty

Those in the Yes camp frequently say that changing the law on same-sex marriage requires nothing more than changing a few words in Act of Parliament.

What they fail to admit is that legalising same-sex marriage is far more complicated.

Religious freedom is a fundamental human right enshrined in international treaties to which Australia is a signatory. Yet other than patchy provision in some state anti-discrimination laws, Commonwealth law fails to offer specific protections for religious liberty.

We have already seen punishment meted out to companies opposed to same-sex marriage — for example the concerted campaign against Coopers Brewery for sponsoring a Bible Society debate on marriage equality.

If the law is eventually changed to allow same-sex couples to marry, it should not create an additional entitlement enabling some citizens to force other citizens to act against their religious beliefs or conscience by making them help celebrate same-sex marriages.

A debate about more than marriage

The No campaign has already skilfully broadened the debate on same-sex marriage to show it goes far beyond defining who can get married.

Also at stake are concerns about protecting the human rights to freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

If the postal plebiscite does go ahead, politicians may be surprised to find that the Australian people share those concerns, too.

Same-sex marriage is more complex than the Yes campaign admits was originally published in ABC News Australia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Chances are you have come across a psychopath. It could be a boss, a colleague, a friend or a partner. Or maybe it is you.

Five to 10 per cent of the population qualify as psychopathic, according to David Gillespie, author of Taming Toxic People: The Science of Identifying and Dealing With Psychopaths At Work and At Home.

A study last year found the rate could be as high as 20 per cent among corporate leaders.

Your average psychopath will display a number of traits: a grandiose sense of self-worth, lack of remorse or guilt, shallow emotional intelligence and little empathy, among others.

“There is usually a dichotomy between how they appeared when you first met them, and how they subsequently appear,” Gillespie told Lateline.

“When you first meet them they are incredibly charming. They tell you everything you want to hear and seem like the most genial and wonderful people you’ve met in your life.

“Very shortly after they are different. People often describe it as a Jekyll and Hyde nature where they’re fine when they are ingratiating themselves with you, and suddenly they’re plain nasty or dismissive towards you.”

Key traits of a psychopath

• Charming
• Self-obsessed
• Fluent liar
• Emotionally manipulative
• Completely lacking in remorse or guilt
• Emotional shallowness and callousness
• No responsibility for their actions
• Impulsive
• Parasitic
• Fearless
• Highly controlling
• Vindictive
• Aggressive and intimidating

Source: David Gillespie

Politicians score high on psychopathic scales

What it drilled down to, Gillespie said, was someone who had no empathy for others.

“I am not for a minute suggesting they are a serial killer or any other kind of criminal,” he writes in the book.

In fact, he said, criminal psychopaths — the kind you see of true crime TV shows — were low-functioning psychopaths, “the ones without the resources to achieve power and money and fame”.

“The more high-functioning psychopaths achieve all of those things without ever committing an overt criminal act.”

That includes politicians, Gillespie said.

“The fact modern politicians score high on psychopathic scales shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody,” he said.

“The thing that drives psychopaths is absolute power over people. It’s the perfect job as far as a psychopath is concerned.”

I definitely have one in my life, so what can I do?

There is no evidence you can change a psychopath, Gillespie said, so do not waste your time trying.

“What you can do is control them … with honesty, transparency, and structured decision-making.”

His number one tip for dealing with the psychopath in your life? Look after yourself.

“Their primary motivation is to extract loyalty and resources from you, and servitude,” he said.

“If you are going to survive that, whether it’s at work or at home, then you have to provide a support network for yourself.

“That means don’t let them cut you off from your friends and family … you will need them constantly when you are dealing with the confusion and disorientation that [the psychopath] brings to your life.”

Gillespie likened a psychopath to a piece of enriched uranium.

“Ignoring it or handling it badly can have horrific consequences,” he writes in the book. “But if you are careful and design the system containing it well, it can produce enormous benefits.”

Originally published at www.abc.net.au on July 25, 2017.

How to deal with your psychopathic boss was originally published in ABC News Australia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Research shows the men most likely to abuse their wives are evangelical Christians who attend church sporadically. Church leaders say they abhor abuse of any kind. But advocates say the church is not just failing to sufficiently address domestic violence, it’s both enabling and concealing it.

By Julia Baird with Hayley Gleeson

The culprits were obvious: it was the menopause or the devil.

Who else could be blamed, Peter screamed at his wife in nightly tirades, for her alleged insubordination, for her stupidity, her lack of sexual pliability, her refusal to join him on the ‘Tornado’ ride at a Queensland waterpark, her annoying friendship with a woman he called “Ratface”? For her sheer, complete failure as a woman?

The abuse went on, day and night, as Sally bore a child, worked morning shifts at the local hospital and stayed up late pumping breast milk for her baby.

She was deeply exhausted, depleted and worn.

The night before Sally finally left her husband and the townhouse they lived in on Sydney’s northern beaches he told her she was also failing her spiritual duties.

“Your problem is you won’t obey me. The Bible says you must obey me and you refuse,” he yelled. “You are a failure as a wife, as a Christian, as a mother. You are an insubordinate piece of s**t.”

Sally, an executive assistant who had just turned 44, stared at him, worrying about whether her neighbours — or her sleeping daughter — could hear his roars through the thin walls.

She knew what had “flicked his switch”: the simple act of coming down to say goodnight, which he interpreted as a lack of willingness to have sex.

Peter then opened his Bible and read out some verses:

“Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Saviour.”
Ephesians 5: 22–23

Next was:

“Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness I permit no woman to teach or have authority over a man; rather, she is to remain silent.”
1 Timothy 2: 11–12

For years, Sally had believed that God wanted her to submit to her husband, and she did her best, bending to his will and working to pay the bills, despite the pain she was in.

But on this night, she was done. The next morning, she packed up her bags, grabbed some clothes for her daughter and left, taking the little girl with her.

She left everything else behind.

Religion and domestic violence: the missing link

When we speak of domestic violence, and the cultural factors that foment it, one crucial element missing from the discussion has been religion.

While it is generally agreed that inequality between the sexes can foster and cultivate environments where men seek to control or abuse women, in Australia there has been very little public debate about how this might impact people in male-led congregations and religious communities, especially those where women are told to be silent and submit to male authority.

In other countries, like the United States and United Kingdom, there has been extensive analysis. So why is Australia so behind on this issue?

In the past couple of years, concern has been growing amongst those working with survivors of domestic violence about the role the Christian church of all denominations can either consciously or inadvertently play in allowing abusive men to continue abusing their wives.

The questions are these: do abused women in church communities face challenges women outside them do not?

Do perpetrators ever claim church teachings on male control excuse their abuse, or tell victims they must stay?

Why have there been so few sermons on domestic violence? Why do so many women report that their ministers tell them to stay in violent marriages?

Is the stigma surrounding divorce still too great, and unforgiving? Is this also a problem for the men who are abused by their wives — a minority but nonetheless an important group?

And if the church is meant to be a place of refuge for the vulnerable, why is it that the victims are the ones who leave churches while the perpetrators remain?

Is it true — as one Anglican bishop has claimed — that there are striking similarities to the church’s failure to protect children from abuse, and that this next generation’s reckoning will be about the failure in their ranks to protect women from domestic violence?

A 12-month ABC News investigation involving dozens of interviews with survivors of domestic violence, counsellors, priests, psychologists and researchers from a range of Christian denominations — including Catholic, Anglican, Baptist, Pentecostal and Presbyterian — has discovered the answers to these questions will stun those who believe the church should protect the abused, not the abusers.

‘I felt that I was almost being raped’

Sally met Peter when she was in her mid-30s, and had been praying for a husband. She wasn’t instantly attracted to him but was charmed by the deluge of flowers and love letters he sent. She grew to believe she was meant to be with him.

She overlooked the fact that she had to buy her own engagement ring and agreed to marry him not long after their meeting.

Peter’s personality changed on the first day of their honeymoon, when he yelled at her for sleeping in, and made plans to go fishing for days without her.

Her bible study leader told her later that she looked like the saddest bride he had ever seen.

The abuse quickly escalated as Peter drank, gambled and demanded sex every second night, usually after having yelled at her for hours.

She later wrote in a statement prepared for court: “If I refused, he would become incandescent with rage. It was easier to give in than argue. Those nights I felt that I was almost being raped.”

Once he forced her to have sex just three weeks after giving birth.

Sally found little comfort in her Pentecostal church, which she had turned to repeatedly. Counsellors there simply advised her to forgive him. She also told her pastor her story, but no one followed it up.

The violence mounted until one day her husband threw their three-year-old daughter across the room after the toddler accidentally bumped his leg.

When she left Peter, Sally also left her church parish, feeling isolated and unwanted as a single mother.

Ten years later, she is still shattered. She wishes she had heard just one sermon on domestic violence, or had one supportive ear.

The Christian men more likely to assault their wives

The fact that domestic violence occurs in church communities is well established. Queensland academic Dr Lynne Baker’s 2010 book, Counselling Christian Women on How to Deal with Domestic Violence, cites a study of Anglican, Catholic and Uniting churches in Brisbane that found 22 per cent of perpetrators of domestic violence and abuse go to church regularly.

But American research provides one important insight: men who attend church less often are most likely to abuse their wives. (Regular church attenders are slightly less likely to commit acts of intimate partner violence.)

Those who are often on the periphery, in other words, who sometimes float between parishes, or sit in the back pews. For these men, the rate of abuse committed is alarmingly high.

As theology professor Steven Tracy wrote in 2008:

“It is widely accepted by abuse experts (and validated by numerous studies) that evangelical men who sporadically attend church are more likely than men of any other religious group (and more likely than secular men) to assault their wives.”

Some attribute these findings to the conservative denominations and churches that preach and model male control, with male-only priesthoods and inviolate teachings on male authority.

Adelaide’s Anglican Assistant Bishop Tim Harris says, “it is well recognised that males (usually) seeking to justify abuse will be drawn to misinterpretations [of the Bible] to attempt to legitimise abhorrent attitudes.”

Stressing that his diocese “strongly rejected” any teachings on male superiority, he told ABC News: “This has been a particular concern for those coming out of evangelical and fundamentalist backgrounds.”

In Australia, it is widely accepted that gender inequality is a contributing factor to violence against women.

The Australian Institute of Family Studies probed this question and concluded: “The vital element to consider is the gender norms and beliefs surrounding male dominance and male superiority, created by power hierarchies that accord men greater status.”

This is confirmed by global research. A study published in the Lancet in 2015 analysed data from 66 surveys across 44 countries, covering the experiences of almost half a million women.

It found that the greatest predictor of partner violence was “environments that support male control”, especially “norms related to male authority over female behaviour”.

The past two decades of research has also shown women in religious communities are less likely to leave violent marriages, more likely to believe that the abuser will change, less inclined to access community resources and more likely to believe it is their fault; that they have failed as wives as they were not able to stop the abuse.

A culture of victim blaming or shaming can cause women to exit the church entirely. The most common story in the dozens heard by ABC News is that when marriages break, the men stay and the women leave.

The CEO of Safe Steps Family Violence Centre, Annette Gillespie, says that in 20 years of working with victims of domestic violence, she found it was “extremely common” that women will be “encouraged by the church to stay in an abusive relationship”.

“I know that for many women the experience of violence was worsened by the lack of support people turned to in the church,” she said.

“Often people say it is the guilt of going against the church teaching that leads them to stay in relationships well beyond a time they should leave because they are trying to please the church as well as please their partners … they often feel they will have to choose between leaving religion or violence.

“So when they leave a relationship, they leave a church.”

Women in faith communities where divorce is shunned, and shameful, often feel trapped in abusive marriages.

In a submission to the Royal Commission on Family Violence, one Victorian woman wrote that five different ministers had told her to remain with a violent husband.

A church counsellor told her: “Be gentle with him, he’s trying to be a man.”

This is particularly true in the Catholic Church, where divorce is forbidden, as will be explored in greater detail in an upcoming instalment of this series.

If pastors prevaricate, or fumble, it could be too late. New research finds women in the church usually only go to their pastors when partners do something so violent they fear they will die.

After 25-year-old old Wubanchi Asefaw was told by her church leaders to return to her husband in early 2014, he stabbed her to death in their western Sydney home shortly afterwards.

The abuse of the Bible

Unlike the Quran, there are no verses in the Bible that may be read as overtly condoning domestic abuse.

To the contrary, it is made clear that God hates violence and relationships must be driven by selflessness, grace and love.

There is no mainstream theologian in Australia who would suggest that a church should be anything but a sanctuary, or that a Christian relationship be marked by anything but love.

But church counsellors and survivors of family violence report that many abusive men, like Sally’s husband, rely on twisted — or literalist — interpretation of Bible verses to excuse their abuse.

Baker, whose 2010 book on counselling abused Christian women sprang from years of doctoral research, writes: “biblical principles and scriptures may be used by the perpetrator as a point of authority to condone his actions, or perhaps to ‘prove’ to the victim that she is not fulfilling her marital obligations.”

Abusive men commonly refer to several different parts of the Bible.

First are the verses — cited by Sally’s husband Peter, above — telling women to submit to their husbands and male authority, under the doctrine known as male headship.

Second are verses that say God hates divorce.

And third are those in 1 Peter that tell women to submit to husbands in a very particular way, as they follow instructions to slaves to submit to even “harsh masters”.

But Denis Fitzgerald, executive director at Catholic Social Services Victoria, says it is crucial for the Bible to be read in light of the culture it was produced in.

“Biblical literalism is not an acceptable approach and part of the teaching role with the bishops is to help the priests and the people to see that texts can’t be taken out of context — you have to look at the broader intent and message of the scriptures,” he says.

And Simon Smart, the Executive Director of the Centre for Public Christianity points to “what [Croatian theologian] Miroslav Volf describes as the difference between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ religion — where thin religion is stripped of its moral content and used as a weapon for goals completely unrelated to the faith.”

The doctrine of male headship: What does it mean?

The doctrine that is most commonly, and controversially cited by abusers is male headship, where a husband is to be the head of the wife in marriage and the wife is to submit, and men are to be head of the church.

What submission means takes many different forms. At its extreme edge, it is complete subservience.

In the 1970s and 1980s, literature coming out of the United States suggested it meant putting up with every possible harm.

According to Elizabeth Hanford Rice in her book Me? Obey Him?, this even included physical violence and child abuse.

Three female authors — Dorothy McGuire, Carol Lewis and Alvena Blatchley — even praised a woman for staying with a man who tried to murder her.

Correct interpretations of scripture are debated in ways not dissimilar to those in the Quran; there is disagreement over translation, hermeneutics, exegesis, the relevance of the culture in which it was written, the then-radical attitudes of acceptance Christ expressed towards women and the role of women in the early church.

These debates hit peak expression in the latter half of the 20th century as most mainstream Christian denominations moved to ordain women to the priesthood, to equal positions to men.

Today, those churches in Australia that do not have women priests include the Catholic, Lutheran and Presbyterian churches, and the influential Sydney Diocese of the Anglican Church.

Some of these groups have responded to the expansion of women’s role elsewhere by restricting it further in their own ranks.

Today, it is clear proponents of headship intend to teach a form of self-sacrificial love — for a man to be head of his wife like Christ is head of the church, and to sacrifice himself to his wife in the same way.

But there remains some confusion about what submission actually means.

In 2009, prominent American evangelical pastor John Piper, a frequent visitor to Sydney, was asked, “What should a wife’s submission to her husband look like if he’s an abuser?”

His response was that if he was “simply hurting her”, then she should “endure verbal abuse for a season”, and “endure perhaps being smacked one night”, before seeking “help from the church”.

Almost four years later, he issued a “clarifying statement” in which he called on men in the church to discipline abusers, and uphold “a beautiful vision” of marriage where men lead with gentleness.

Another influential pastor James Dobson has in the past advised women to bait their abusive husbands to goad them into behaving badly, which he believed would shock them into realising they had a problem and agree to counselling.

In 2013, American pastor Steven J Cole concluded in a sermon that “a wife may need to submit to some abuse”.

“The difficult question is,” he writes, “how much? My view is that a wife must submit to verbal and emotional abuse, but if the husband begins to harm her physically, she needs to call civil or church authorities.

“Although physical abuse is not a biblical basis for divorce, I would counsel separation in some cases to protect the wife while the husband gets his temper under control.

“But even in such situations, a Christian wife must not provoke her husband to anger and she must display a gentle spirit.”

In 2016, American evangelist Kirk Cameron told the Christian Post: “Wives are to honour and respect and follow their husband’s lead, not to tell their husband how he ought to be a better husband.

“When each person gets their part right, regardless of how their spouse is treating them, there is hope for real change in their marriage.”

Time and again in evangelical literature, marital success is predicated on female submission; it is the basis on which women are judged or praised.

In Sydney, as recently as 2015, David Ould, the rector of Glenquarie Anglican Church — also active in the conservative Anglican Church League — asked if it might be “a Godly wise choice” for women to stay with abusive husbands given the Bible teaching in 1 Peter 3, telling wives to submit to their husbands.

These verses follow on from those in 1 Peter 2 that tell slaves to submit to masters — even those who are harsh, or, in other words, physically violent.

Ould, who now works to protect women in his parish and region from domestic violence, later clarified his comments.

He told ABC News his central message was: “I would understand how women would read that passage and choose to stay, but I myself would be urging them to get out and work out what it means from a safe position.”

Male headship ‘providing the wiring’ for abuse

Today, a growing number of counsellors, psychologists and welfare workers are reporting that abusers cite the idea of male headship to sanction violence.

Anglican counsellor from Charles Sturt University Nicola Lock, who has been working with domestic violence cases for 25 years, says the use of headship theology in spousal abuse is “very common”.

“Anecdotally, teaching of headship has been seen to be contributing to the problem of domestic violence, both in encouraging abusive male partners, and preventing female partners from challenging abusive behaviours, or leaving an abusive relationship,” Lock said.

As Dr Johanna Harris Tyler, a lecturer at the University of Exeter in the UK who was brought up in Sydney Anglicanism, argues: “While male headship may not necessarily trip the switch of abuse, it can provide the wiring.”

This is a particularly sensitive point in the Sydney Anglican Church, which is known for its robust advocacy of male headship.

Any suggestion of its abuse usually evokes vehement rebuke and defence from senior clergy. Ministers who uphold headship say their teachings are just being confused with patriarchy, and twisted by those who abuse power.

Those who uphold “egalitarian” views of marriage in this diocese report being sidelined, overlooked for jobs and ostracised.

Some told ABC News they could not publicly state that they believed in equal relationships between men and women, for they would lose their jobs.

And as domestic violence advocate Barbara Roberts points out, in conservative churches women are often taught that desire to overthrow male authority is a sign of sin — thereby making feminism innately wrong.

In other words, if male authority and leadership is from God, any challenge to that is from women’s sinful natures — or the devil.

Kara Hartley is the Archdeacon for Women in the Diocese of Sydney and deputy chair of a taskforce looking into church responses to domestic violence.

She stresses there is nothing whatsoever in the Bible to condone abuse, and that men and women just have different roles.

“The responsibility of men is to lovingly, sacrificially care for their wife, and a wife to submit to his care, his leadership, his loving sacrifice to her,” Hartley told ABC News.

“Now, for many they’ll say that’s submission, and therefore headship, [which] creates an imbalance in the marriage. But actually when they’re put together, a woman’s voluntary … willing submission to her husband, in his loving sacrificial care of her, there’s a beautiful picture there.”

Sydney Anglican Archbishop Dr Glenn Davies agrees, telling ABC News “submission is never coercive, it’s always voluntary, so the wife offers herself in that relationship.

“It becomes dangerous where in a marriage the husband over-reaches and manipulates the woman … it’s not submission that’s gone wrong, it’s the husband that’s gone wrong.”

It is important to understand, he says, that “there is no way in which we countenance domestic violence in any form be it spiritual, emotional or physical, in our church, we are absolutely opposed to that”.

“It’s not the teaching, it’s the distortion of the teaching which is the problem, I don’t believe teaching the Bible produces violence in domestic situations.”

But it would be wrong to portray this simply as an issue in Sydney.

The difficulties with the interpretation of headship spreads across denominations.

In February 2016, Catholic bishop Vincent Long cautioned that literal interpretations of the Bible “provide the basis for systematic oppression or structural discrimination of women and lead communities — even church communities — to protecting perpetrators of domestic violence while simultaneously heaping shame and scorn upon its victims”.

Others point the finger at all-male leadership.

Sydney psychologist Kylie Pidgeon, who also works with perpetrators and survivors of family violence, wrote in a recent paper that women are more vulnerable in churches where only men lead:

“[Men] occupy the positions of greater power and public influence in a church and hold the offices charged with major decision-making and general oversight of the spiritual health of the congregation. Women usually fill ‘support’ roles, such as teaching kids’ church, reading the Bible, or preparing morning tea. While the intentions of men in positions of leadership are often good; to exercise their authority with love and care, and while a male-led structure by no means guarantees that women will be abused, it is apparent that patriarchal structures place women at greater risk of abuse.”

By failing to pastor women, or encourage them to lead or speak, Pidgeon says, male leadership may unwittingly be “giving ‘silent permission’ to male congregation members to similarly rule over and neglect their wives”.

In churches where women are not allowed to speak or preach, they may also worry that they will not be believed.

Erica Hamence, assistant minister at the Anglican St Barnabas Broadway in Sydney, wrote recently that in male-led churches, “women have as much room to speak as the male leaders allow. That’s a profoundly vulnerable position to be in, and one which I suspect some male ministers are not always able to empathise with.

“If a woman suffering abuse wasn’t completely confident that she would be believed, that the particular nature of the abuse would be understood, and that she would be supported by her church’s leader, she would most likely continue to suffer alone.”

How do all-male hierarchies respond?

Almost all-male hierarchies are common in many conservative congregations across denominations — Catholic, Baptist, Presbyterian, Anglican and Pentecostal — as are poor responses from pastors.

Susan, a student and mother, went to a Pentecostal Church in Adelaide for most of the 23 years of her married life.

She describes her marriage as akin to a horror story. She was “repeatedly raped” by her husband and was continually unnerved by strange incidents that kept happening to her children in her absence.

Bruises appeared, faces were bloodied, weak excuses were given. One day her husband was rebuking his daughter for wearing a revealing top when “she ran and hit the wall” and lost a tooth.

On another day, he pushed Susan out of the car and left her on the side of the road.

A psychologist attached to her church told her divorce was not an option. The pastor’s wife told her to separate but not divorce as her husband could change.

It was not until she came across the website, Cry for Justice: Awakening the Evangelical Church to Domestic Violence and Abuse in its Midst, run by Roberts, that she realised it might be possible to divorce her husband.

When she left him, she left her congregation too.

“It was really, really hard to leave the church as I had been there 20 years,” Susan told ABC News.

“Eventually the pastor said, ‘why don’t you just leave, I can’t keep you safe because he is still here’.”

Her ex followed her to her next church, and tracked down the pastor who told her — after meeting him for coffee once — that her ex was a great guy: “I can see why you married him!”

“Fortunately,” she says, “the church I am at now is not very strong on headship, and has a modern attitude to divorce. They won’t stand up on stage and say, like they did at the church I attended with my ex-husband, that women should submit and God doesn’t want you to divorce.”

In Susan’s Pentecostal church, the Assemblies of God, only 4 per cent of pastors were female in 2013, and the national executive board was all male.

And, problematically, Pentecostal women are often taught that part of being female is yielding.

Prominent preacher Bobbie Houston told a Hillsong conference in 2008: “[Women are] big, we can step back from an argument. Someone has to step down, to leave a space for God to work, and God put it in feminine DNA to do that.”

As documented by Meredith Fraser, female submission is touted in Pentecostalism as a cure-all for marital problems: If women pray, are deferential and submit, there will be hope. The culture of self-sacrifice can be so strong it lends itself to “a certain masochism”.

Many Pentecostal women are advised to separate, but never divorce or remarry. They also report being told by their pastors to go home and make love to husbands who torment and terrify them.

Sex is touted as an answer for many marital maladies.

Momentum for change is building

In the past three years, alarm bells have begun to ring about the role religion may play in fostering, or concealing abuse.

There have been two substantial inquiries into domestic violence in Australia in recent years. Both have identified religion as a significant, under-reported problem.

In 2014, the Queensland Government appointed then governor-general Quentin Bryce chair of the Special Taskforce on Domestic and Family Violence.

The report, Not Now, Not Ever, tabled in February 2015, pointed to the “challenge” of religious leaders:

“Disturbingly, a number of submissions and individuals reported to the taskforce that the leaders of faith in their particular community would not engage in helping victims or condemn perpetrators of domestic and family violence. These leaders of faith did not see it as the role of the religious gathering to ‘lecture’ about what happens in the privacy of a home … The taskforce challenges leaders of all faiths and religions to take a leadership role in fostering and encouraging respectful relationships in their community, and to teach their communities and congregations that coercive control and violence are never acceptable.”

In the same month, the Victorian Government established the Royal Commission into Family Violence following a series of family violence-related deaths in the state, most notably that of Luke Batty, who was killed by his father in 2014.

It sought to identify the most effective ways to address domestic violence, hold perpetrators accountable, and support victims.

The commission received 968 public submissions and tabled its report in March 2016, which made 227 recommendations. This commission, too, noted as a “challenge” faith leaders who were “predominantly or exclusively men”.

For many women who sought help from a faith leader, the commission reported, “the response was inadequate … some faith leaders were uninformed and ill-equipped to respond to such disclosures, ‘often the advice given wasn’t helpful because the faith leader didn’t know what kind of advice to give’.”

Examples cited were of religious leaders telling women that their partner’s abuse was their fault, or that they should stay in “intolerable” situations.

These responses, with some religious attitudes and practices, the commission found, “risk exposing victims to further and sustained abuse by family members”.

In its final report, the commission recommended faith communities examine the ways they respond to domestic violence and whether these practices may deter victims or condone perpetrators.

In other words, whether they conceal, not reveal, abuse.

Within the church, more and more concerned people have begun to recognise the magnitude and seriousness of the problem in their midst, and agitate for change.

Leaders who were previously ignorant or defensive have begun to work to understand the issues; some have been horrified, or at least sobered, to discover the extent of abuse in their midst.

How are churches responding?

A survey of the major Christian churches in Australia has revealed many have developed — or are in the process of developing — formal protocols and resources for preventing and responding to domestic violence in their communities.

Some also require clergy and parish staff to undertake specific domestic violence training, usually run by external providers — though this is often voluntary.

Several churches also reported using guidebooks that advise clergy and pastoral workers on how to recognise and respond to domestic violence and abuse.

One resource, cited by the Lutheran Church and several Anglican and Catholic dioceses, highlights “unequal power relations between men and women” as a root cause of abuse, and specifically calls out the use of scripture as justification for control and abuse as a form of domestic violence.

A progressive group called Common Grace is also working to build a coalition of Christians prepared to speak up about domestic violence.

As Bishop Richard Condie of the Anglican Diocese of Tasmania said:

“The scriptural teaching about male headship in the home would be distorted if it were used to justify control, superiority or violence against women … I encourage my clergy to continue to … speak openly about family violence and domestic abuse in their church communities. We need to be prepared to challenge such behaviours — it cannot be excused or justified.”

And, motivated largely by the Royal Commission, Catholic Social Services Victoria in February distributed a domestic violence “resource kit” to parishes.

It includes a statement from the Bishops of Victoria, who condemn domestic violence and call on Catholic Church communities to do more to prevent it — 25 years after their counterparts in America did the same.

“As pastoral leaders in Victoria,” the Bishops say, “we reject a reading of scripture that condones domestic violence. A correct reading of scripture leads to an understanding of the equal dignity of men and women and to relationships based on mutuality and love”.

‘The vast majority of churches are naive’

But critics dismiss these efforts as slow-grinding, insufficiently resourced, too narrow in scope and fundamentally impeded by a lack of female leaders.

Taboos remain intact, the subject is still shrouded with shame, and efforts stymied by misinformation.

Roberts, who was in an abusive marriage for six years, now co-leads the website A Cry For Justice, where victims of domestic abuse can find support and resources and Christian men and women can learn about this issue from a biblical perspective.

She has corresponded with hundreds of thousands of church-going survivors of abuse — with more than a million visitors to her site in the past five years — and says overall, “a few churches are making efforts to tackle it but their efforts are not nearly meeting the need”.

And scarcely any churches are taking action at the coalface to tackle the problem.

“Most churches think they deal well with it when a particular case is reported to them,” Roberts says.

“But the vast majority of churches are naive about the dynamics of domestic abuse, the mentality of abusers, and the tactics abusers use to manipulate and resist having to take responsibility for their bad conduct.”

As for domestic violence experts outside the church, Roberts says, “many churches are wary of [them] because they assume they are all infected with the virus of feminism”.

It should be noted that a small number of churches contacted by ABC News either did not respond to repeated requests, or declined to comment on how they were addressing domestic violence, including the Catholic Archdioceses of Sydney, Brisbane, Hobart and Darwin and the Anglican Church of Southern Queensland in Brisbane.

‘I am a wreck of a person now’

What is clear from the women interviewed by ABC News is that they do not resent the church — they urgently seek its reform.

Louise, a mother of five children living in Brisbane, says she is desperate the “church’s participation in domestic violence be exposed”.

She split from her husband, Bill, 14 years ago, and is still suffering trauma. Bill was her first boyfriend. He charmed her utterly and they married quickly.

Then, from the moment of the marriage, he lost interest in her and frequently erupted in “awful fits of rage”. He pinned her up against walls, raped her and controlled her movements.

She was not allowed out on her own, even to do the shopping. For two and a half hours every morning and every night he yelled at her.

Every time she got pregnant, it got worse.

“I was sure my husband was going to kill me,” she says.

Throughout his tirades, Bill hurled Bible verses at Louise, telling her to obey him, and accusing her of being Hosea’s wife — a prostitute.

She longed to kill herself, and one day walked down to the local railway line to throw herself under a train. She had not read the timetable, though, and while she was waiting, her daughter ran from her house and found her.

Turning to look at her daughter, she realised she could not leave her children alone with their father.

Finally, when she was pregnant with her fourth child, she told her pastor what was happening. “I actually got down on my knees and begged, I was so desperate,” she says.

The pastor then arranged for someone to interview her 12-year-old daughter to see if Louise was telling the truth. They concluded that Bill just had a bad temper.

When a pastor from their Pentecostal church came to visit, he did not make it past the front door.

“My ex stood up with that look of madness in his face and the pastor ran off with his tail between his legs,” Louise says.

Even this did not trigger alarm bells. The attitude of the church, she says, was “cold and callous. Really, really cold”.

The next person who came to their house was a Christian lawyer from the church who told her bluntly: “God doesn’t like divorce.”

Today, more than a decade after her marriage ended, Louise is still shattered.

“I am a wreck of a person now, I don’t function very well, I don’t see a soul, I don’t have a life. I had been isolated for so long, I don’t know how to live a proper life.”

Sometimes she gets up on a Sunday morning and gets dressed for church, but just sits on the end of her bed.

“I am a bit too scared of pastors, of people,” she says.

“We just wanted to do God’s will and do what it says in the Bible, and submit to whatever authority. I did believe in female submission — it is meant to be submission to love. It is meant to be a relationship of protection and love.”

The path forwards

What is required is substantial cultural change, of the scale that was required for the church to take sexual abuse of children seriously, says retired Bishop John Harrower of Tasmania.

As far back as 2004, he wrote a piece pointing out the parallels between the mistakes the church made over the abuse of children with those they have made over the abuse of women.

The first response of the church was to not hear, to not believe it was happening, he wrote. The second was to treat abuse as “a one-off moral failure”, which saw perpetrators moved from state to state, parish to parish, without being punished for their crimes.

Another mistake was to think simply having a quiet word to the abuser and giving advice to the victim to forgive will solve anything, to fail to consult counsellors — and, surely, police.

“We have been tempted”, he wrote, “to collude with offenders that their behaviour is nothing more than a matter of private morality”.

“If the church colludes in this sleight of hand, it can find itself, as it did in the matter of sexual abuse of children,” he wrote, “ignoring the fact that these matters are criminal behaviours; and that they have very real long-term consequences for the victims”.

What has been lacking in church communities, counsellors say, as it also is in the broader society, is first, an understanding of the psychology of violent men, and a recognition of how unlikely is it that they can change.

The main problem, Roberts says, is that churches are too easily hoodwinked by the charm and manipulation of abusers:

“Jesus told his followers they needed to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves, but most churches are not wise about the mentality and tactics of evildoers, nor are they aware of how evildoers masquerade as believers in the church. The abuser typically has a Dr Jekyll persona that depicts him (or occasionally her) as a wonderful and godly man, so that no-one would suspect the truth … If the victim reports the abuse to church leaders, the abuser is skilled at shifting blame, evading accountability, and pretending repentance and reformation. The vast majority of church leaders aren’t discerning enough to detect these tactics of abusers for what they are: lies [and] often advise the victim to remain with or return to the abuser.”

Second, is an understanding of what domestic violence is.

A theme common to all of the interviews ABC News conducted with survivors of intimate partner violence was that they did not know what it was they were suffering until they saw a website, or pamphlet, outlining the nature of domestic violence.

This is especially the case for those who were abused not physically but sexually, financially, emotionally and verbally.

Almost every single woman who had experienced abuse in her marriage told ABC News her husband had raped her.

What has also been lacking, according to Anglican Isabella Young, who left her first marriage because of her Christian husband’s violence and abuse, and is now actively trying to force the church to take domestic violence seriously by authoring a book on the subject, is a clear indication that abuse is grounds for divorce — not just in the eyes of the law, but in the eyes of God.

She says: “Confusion still evident among a sizeable proportion of clergy and in published Sydney Anglican Church documents on this issue causes much pain and confusion among abuse victims.”

Archbishop of Sydney Glenn Davies says divorce should be avoided, but that if a woman could prove that her husband had “ignored and overturned his commitment to Christ as a Christian man”, divorce could be acceptable.

Abusive clergy moved to different parishes

As was the case with clergy who abused children, clergy who abuse their wives have also been encouraged — or allowed — to move from state to state.

Tabitha, now 59 and living in Sydney, was married to an Anglican clergyman who emotionally, financially and sexually abused her for decades, and who was moved to another part of the country when exposed.

He controlled the music she listened to, the books she read, the wine she drank.

He demanded to know where she was at all times and she was not allowed to use an ATM or drink lemonade without his permission.

He threatened divorce if she cut her hair and constantly accused her of cheating on him. He was angered by the way she put the cereal container in the cupboard, and so wrote on it in firm black letters: “THIS WAY TABITHA”.

He was the parish priest. Tabitha’s self esteem was steamrollered.

For years she dreamed of leaving, but it was not until he told her, out on a walk one day, that if she did not comply with a “depraved” list of sexual demands, he would divorce her. She refused.

She sought the success of local bishops without luck; they refused to believe he had behaved badly. Her husband moved to another state, to head up another parish.

Today, Tabitha has rebuilt her life, is working and is finally debt free after enduring a financially crippling divorce.

Her two children are almost grown. But she suffers from depression, has no savings and will need to leave Sydney once she retires because she can’t afford the rent.

She is lonely, and struggles with feelings of failure. She watches a lot of Netflix.

Sitting at a conference table in her office, sipping tea, a gently spoken Tabitha told ABC News: “Even in the darkest days, I never felt that God had deserted me, only the church.

“In one of the very few major arguments I had with my ex after the split, when he was throwing scripture up at me, I remember yelling at him that this was not God-based or scripturally supported and that God was crying buckets over what he was doing, and how dare he bring God into this situation when it wasn’t his fault.”

Names have been changed to protect those in this piece who have survived domestic violence.

This is the second instalment of an ABC News investigation into domestic violence and religion. You can read part one in the series — on domestic violence and Islam — here.

Family and domestic violence support services

• 1800 Respect national helpline: 1800 737 732
• Women’s Crisis Line: 1800 811 811
• Men’s Referral Service: 1300 766 491
• Lifeline (24 hour crisis line): 131 114
• Relationships Australia: 1300 364 277

Originally published at www.abc.net.au on July 17, 2017.

‘Submit to your husbands’: Women told to endure domestic violence in the name of God was originally published in ABC News Australia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When Tina was diagnosed with cancer, she and husband Aaron worked hard to create memories for their son so he wouldn’t forget her.

As Lucas Cheang looks through photos in his scrapbook, he points to one of his mother Tina lying in bed and says simply: “This is when mummy died.”

It’s a heartbreaking sentence to hear from a six-year-old.

When Tina was diagnosed with secondary breast cancer in 2010, five months after Lucas was born, she and her husband Aaron were devastated.

But after chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery and hormone therapy, she was as doctors called her “a miracle” and well for another three years — until the cancer returned.

“We were married for almost 14 years,” Aaron said.

“I was worried Tina would never hear Lucas say his first words, call her mum … that she would die before he had fully developed that bond.

“She was amazing the whole time. She was always thankful for life, for the chance to be a mum, and she was just full of joy and always said every day was a gift from God.”

Rather than hide her illness, Tina and Aaron did all they could to create memories together for Lucas in the 14 months she had left.

Aaron reduced his work hours to part-time, the family went on excursions around Sydney, and he took plenty of photos and videos even of the “mundane things” Tina would do around the house.

As Christians, they spoke to Lucas at length about how they didn’t know why Tina had gotten cancer, but that when she died her soul would rise to heaven where she would wait for him.

“One of the difficult things is that people avoid talking about people who die,” Aaron said.

“We use euphemisms like ‘someone’s gone’ … but they don’t help little kids, so I definitely try and make sure we talk about Tina dying in very concrete terms.”

Tina died at home on the morning of November 6, 2015.

Lucas was in the room with her and describes that moment as when “mummy breathed out her last breath and even the nurse couldn’t help her”.

Helping kids come to terms with death

Speaking to young children with concrete words is very important, according to psychologist Nathan MacArthur.

Mr MacArthur is the bereavement service leader at HammondCare North and counselled Aaron and Lucas after Tina’s death.

“If we say someone’s passed away that can be confusing, or saying go to sleep; kids can then get scared to go to sleep,” he said.

“Kids at that age are very concrete thinkers. Being able to talk about when people die as their brains stop working, their lungs stop breathing … that’s how we explain how people die.

“That can feel enormously confronting for parents.”

Mr MacArthur recommended parents use books to help them find the words to explain to their children why their mum or dad is dying.

He also said to enlist the help of family, friends and the school particularly at times when the responsibilities of being a carer, a parent and breadwinner can feel overwhelming.

The same applies once the family member dies.

“Maintain routine,” Mr MacArthur said.

“Children will continue to ask a lot of questions. Be able to answer those questions clearly.

“Their behaviour might change with grief, like they might be clingy or try and act older.

“Keep having conversations with them about the parent, keep the memory present.”

Moving forward

At the start of her illness, Tina and Aaron set up a blog to keep family and friends updated with her progress.

Her humour and good spirit are reflected throughout her posts, like in one of the entries in 2015:

“Just a heads up: If things go badly I *will* be on the look out for an appropriate godly, single bride for Aaron! Must be good with kids. If that’s you, and you’re summoned to my death bed, don’t worry, it’s just for an interview! ;) I will also take expressions of interest, but not quite yet! :)

Tina’s wishes were somewhat fulfilled by a friend from church, Naomi, who struck up a friendship with Aaron months after Tina had died.

After six months of chatting over Skype because Naomi was working overseas, and one visit with Lucas to Dubai, the pair became engaged and married about eight weeks ago.

“I think that’s one of the reasons the relationship worked, we could talk openly about Tina and there was never awkwardness about that, and never any awkwardness with Lukey either,” Naomi said.

One of Lucas’s anxieties after Tina died was who would look after him if his father also passed away.

“He had a really clear idea in his mind that there was a lot more security once we were married,” Naomi said.

“I think he was just really happy to have a mum and be like other kids again.”

By Amanda Hoh

How I prepared my son for the death of his mum was originally published in ABC News Australia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.