Those who wish to live rightly in God’s world must not overcorrect by seeking to give up all power, control, authority, and gain. Instead, we recognize that though those qualities may be abused, they were given by God for our good and for the good of others in his world. We must pursue those goods humbly and in faith, and in that way we will both prevent much abuse and respond rightly to abuse when it occurs. We will take seriously our duties to protect those entrusted to our care—thus preventing abuse, and we will exercise and submit to authority in faith. Christians need not and must not give up our leadership in this age.
The Heart of Abuse is Not What it Seems
With awareness about abuse and its destructive effects on the rise, American Christians are being offered yet another manifestation of egalitarianism as the best possible response. This is unsurprising because modern notions of abuse have been forged within the fires of a feminist framework. The Southern Baptist Convention may be ground zero, but the battle is either already underway or coming soon to every major denomination. Cultural currents that have been sweeping over America for decades are seeking to determine the church’s response: will we be able to recognize what is happening and turn the tide?
The Duluth Model
It began in the 1980s when a coalition in Duluth, Minnesota was the first in the nation to offer a coordinated community response to wife batterers. The Domestic Abuse Intervention Program was born out of an admirable desire to help women to be safe from violent partners. By coordinating at every level: victims, police, probation officers, social workers, and the judiciary, Duluth pioneered an approach that has since been utilized in all 50 states and in 17 nations. The Duluth Model (DM), as it has come to be known, was a rousing success.
Behind the DM was Ellen Pence, a lesbian sociologist and activist who was deeply involved in the battered women’s movement under second-wave feminism. Pence self-consciously formed the DM with a feminist framework: “Whether the particular planners are aware of it or not, programs for batterers are situated in a political and historical context of the feminist anti-violence movement.”1 Feminist values and assumptions were baked into the cake from the outset.
Central to the DM is the idea that abusers are driven by a desire for power and control. Behind that desire lies a culture that has been formed by men for men in order to restrict women (and children) and to privilege men in the world. Therefore, when a man feels that he is losing power or control, he feels justified to use violence in an attempt to regain it. According to the DM, this kind of thinking has permeated our entire society, affecting us all: “We’ve all been socialized in a culture that values power, a culture in which the thinking that we challenge in the [batterer] groups is present in every aspect of our daily lives. Our schools, churches, and places of work are all structured hierarchically. All of us have engaged in at least some of the tactics batterers use to control their partners.”2
This philosophy is best represented in their widely-utilized DM Power and Control Wheel:

The Wheel graphically displays the core value of POWER AND CONTROL and the requisite ring of VIOLENCE that encompasses it. Odds are that if you have received training in abuse, you have seen the Wheel or been instructed in its framework.
Under the DM, the solution to abuse is found in undoing the oppressive hierarchies that fill our culture: “When we as a society decide that women have certain subservient roles and men have certain privileged roles, then we also give men the message that they can enforce those roles with whatever tools are at their disposal…The historic oppression and continued subjugation of women in most cultures occurs because men have defined almost every facet of their societies, thereby perpetuating a sexist belief system and institutionalizing male privilege.”3 Therefore, the solution to abuse is found in dismantling hierarchy and fostering equality.
That understanding is represented in the DM Equality Wheel:

Again, the framework is direct and clear: EQUALITY is the core of a healthy relationship, and under such an understanding, persons can relate within an atmosphere of NONVIOLENCE. Thus under the DM, we find a clear and succinct description of the problem of abuse and its solution. Over the past four decades, the DM has gained increasing influence as its clear logic and comprehensive system have offered an attractive package for those seeking to understand and respond to the horrors of abuse. It is remarkable how ubiquitous the language of ‘power and control’ is within the world of abuse counselors, across the ideological spectrum.
Power for Good?
Before turning to analysis and response to the prevailing paradigm, it is necessary to recognize one more variable in the mix. In The Myth of a Christian Nation, Gregory Boyd popularized a power-over/power-under framework in calling Christians to eschew the “kingdom of the world” in order to live for the “kingdom of God.” According to Boyd: “While all the versions of the kingdom of the world acquire and exercise power over others, the kingdom of God, incarnated and modeled in the person of Jesus Christ, advances only by exercising power under others. It expands by manifesting the power of self-sacrificial, Calvary-like love.”4
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Ellen Pence and Michael Paymar, Education Groups for Men Who Batter (New York: Springer Publishing, 1993), 172.
Education Groups for Men Who Batter, 1.
Education Groups for Men Who Batter, 147.
Gregory A. Boyd, The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power is Destroying the Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), 14.

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America is a multi-ethnic, multi-faith, and deeply religious republic. If one or both parties can embrace each element of that reality, then we have a chance to make sure that seismic shift moves our politics towards the respectful pluralism that America requires. 

There’s talk of realignment in the air. If you think all the way back to 2012, you might remember a certain phrase—the coalition of the ascendant. This was the Obama coalition, the collection of all of America’s growing demographics, from nonwhite voters to single women. The Romney voters, by contrast, were fading. White, Christian, and married, they were the demographic losers in a population that was becoming both more diverse and more secular. Democratic dominance was inevitable.
That analysis should have caused us to feel a certain looming dread. Nations that use race or ethnicity as the organizing principle of politics are often quite unstable, and quite violent. This is true across the world, and it’s true in our own land. Systematic racial division and oppression fractured the country once. It’s foolish to think it couldn’t fracture again—especially when the political class intentionally mobilizes voters to vote as a racial bloc.
Optimistic Democrats didn’t see Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 so much as a refutation of the coalition of the ascendant theory as a quirk of the electoral college and a reminder that Hillary Clinton wasn’t Barack Obama. The nation wasn’t quite majority-minority yet, and thus that the white majority could still win races when identity politics reign supreme.
But 2020 told a different tale. The Democrats got whiter, the Republicans got more diverse, and now all the assumptions are scrambled. Donald Trump lost the popular vote by a far wider margin than he did in 2016, but he did materially better with Hispanic, Asian, and black voters. In fact, Trump did better than Romney with nonwhite voters in 2016 (an improvement then mainly attributed to Hillary Clinton’s weaknesses), and he improved on that showing in 2020. What was once seen as an aberration now looks like a trend.
The trend continues. Last week Axios’s Josh Kraushaar described an ongoing “seismic shift” in the two parties’ coalitions. As outlined in a New York Times/Siena College poll, “Democrats now have a bigger advantage with white college graduates than they do with nonwhite voters.” The Democratic Party’s losses with Hispanics are remarkable. Whereas Obama won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2012, and Biden won 65 percent in 2020, now the Hispanic vote is “statistically tied.”
Moreover, there are good reasons to believe that Hispanic voters will continue to migrate to the GOP. As Ruy Teixeira described this week on his Substack, comprehensive issue polling from Echelon Insights demonstrates that strong progressives have substantially different political and cultural views from Hispanics.
Hispanic voters are far more likely to believe that America is “the greatest country in the world,” far less likely to support defunding the police, far less likely to believe “racism is built into our society,” and far less likely to believe that transgender athletes should play on sports teams that match their current gender identity. In most cases, the polling gap is just immense.
What accounts for such monumental differences in beliefs in values? As my colleague Jonah Goldberg often (and rightly) says, we should reject monocausal explanations for complex social phenomena, but here’s a factor that simply isn’t discussed enough. The Democratic Party has a huge “God gap,” and that God gap is driving a wedge between its white and nonwhite voters.
Let’s look at the data. A 2018 Pew Research Center survey on American religious beliefs provides us with a picture that’s worth a thousand words:
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Do you find it accidental or coincidental that immediately after Jesus, Paul, and Peter all instruct us to be the kinds of people who refuse to “fight fire with fire” or “punch back twice as hard” their very next words are about persecution and suffering? This is not an accident. Far from being “unsuited” for our times, the cultural world into which God gave all of these commands was far worse, far more hostile, and far more polarized than our own. There was no asterisk on these commands, no “do this unless you live in a hostile world.” The hostile world was already baked in. And you know what? This was not a recipe for being dominated by the world. It was a recipe for overcoming the world. Christianity conquered the Roman Empire with this ethic.

Almost a decade ago I spoke at a conference in Portland, Oregon. I recently came across my prepared remarks, which honestly I’d completely forgotten. I’m going to borrow from it liberally for this newsletter, since the conference is long-forgotten and my remarks were never published. Consider that I said the following in 2013:
We live in a very challenging cultural environment. Have things ever seemed as polarized as they are right now? Right vs. Left, Gay vs. Straight, Tolerance vs. Bigotry, and we could go on all night rehearsing the divisions! During the 90s I remember pundits and social observers confidently declaring that the so-called “culture wars” were over. It would be an age of peace and economic prosperity, with no more conflict over thorny moral questions like abortion, euthanasia, or homosexuality. If only! I trust I do not need to tell people living in Portland, Oregon, that these sorts of cultural conflicts are alive and well.
Heh. What did I know? Have things ever seemed as polarized? We hadn’t seen anything at all yet, had we? That was all pre-Woke Mobs, pre-Trump, and pre-Portland-being-a-graffiti-painted-post-apocalyptic wasteland. I went on to describe our shifting culture and predicted that the LGBTQ agenda—actually I don’t think there was a Q on it back then—would be a major catalyst for increasing hostility toward Christians.
I continued on with this illustration, which I think holds up very well:
Being on the West Coast, I understand that Oregon occasionally gets earthquakes. I’ve personally never experienced one. But what is the first instinct when the ground literally starts to move under your feet? I imagine you reach out and grab for something stable, usually frantically and in a panic. We need to be steadied and balanced. And cultural earthquakes are no different. When things shift and change, when definitions change, cultural mores radically shift, when the old things cannot be taken for granted anymore, we can feel extremely vulnerable. We can feel afraid, alone, helpless, and without resources. Usually the shift feels completely new, something we’ve never experienced before. And we then automatically think that nobody else has ever experienced it before.
And when we think nobody else has experienced it before, nobody else has had to face the hostility we now face, then next step seems clear enough: our forefathers and foremothers are of no help to us. Our “old’ way of engaging culture must be the culprit, not the solution, for the hostility we face. Hence, the current claims that old ways of doing things are “unsuited for the times.”
There is a humorous Sci-Fi cult classic book called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by British writer Douglas Adams. In the story, the Hitchhiker’s Guide itself is, in fact, a galactic encyclopedia designed to give vital information to the lonely galactic traveler. And on the cover of that vast resource is a warm, smiley face accompanied by the words: “Don’t Panic!”
It seems to me that as we Christians make our way through an unpredictable, sometimes crazy, sometimes hostile world, we have the ultimate guide: God himself. God speaks. And you know what the number one message of the Bible is for people living in the midst of cultural hostility? Don’t panic. You live in precedented times and you are not alone.
It is the most frequent command in the Bible: “Do not be afraid.”
“Fear not.” Over and over again. God knows that we are prone to fear. And God exhorts us again and again to not fear. This isn’t because God is naïve. He knows that sometimes there is legitimate reason to fear.
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