In her book, The Toxic War on Masculinity, author Nancy Percy writes that research has found that evangelical protestant men who attend church regularly are the least likely of any group in America to commit domestic violence.

But nominal Christian family men do fit the negative stereotypes of bad husbands … shockingly so. They spend less time with their children. Their wives report significantly lower levels of happiness, and their marriages are less stable. Whereas active evangelical men are 35% less likely to divorce than secular men, nominal Christian men are 20% more likely to divorce than secular men.

Finally, the real stunner: whereas committed church-going couples report the lowest rate of violence of any group (2.8 percent), nominal husbands report the highest rate of any group (7.2 percent)—even higher than secular couples. Sociologist Brad Wilcox, one of the nation’s top experts on marriage, writes, “The most violent husbands in America are nominal, evangelical protestants who attend church infrequently or not at all.”

Percy summarizes: “It seems that many nominal men hang around the fringes of the Christian world just enough to hear the language of headship and submission, but not enough to learn the biblical meaning of those terms—like skimming the news headlines without reading the actual stories. They cherry pick verses from the Bible and read them through a grid of male superiority and entitlement.”