While Christian marriages have been shown to have a lower incidence of abuse, the tragic truth is that wife battering occurs in Christian homes as well. Generalizing from all of the studies done in churches among Christian women, one can conservatively estimate that for every 60 married women in a church, 10 are being verbally abused by their husbands, and two or three are being physically beaten as well.

Reverend Joy Bussert, director of the Battered Women Project for the Minnesota Council of Churches, says, "Batterers are often pillars of our churches, men who teach Sunday school and serve on the church council. Statistically, men who batter often work in highly respected professions as medical doctors, psychiatrists, policemen, human services people, and somewhere near the top of the list, ordained clergymen."