I have a new story at the just-launched Slate spin-off, Double X:
On Sunday afternoons, Sheri Ferber, a 43-year-old mother of three, listens online to Rick Warren’s sermons, streamed from the 25,000-member Saddleback Church where she was a devoted member for ten years. Although Sheri, pictured here, now lives an hour away in Temecula, California, she hangs on the weekly sermons like a woman in exile. It’s the closest she gets to church these days.
Ferber is a petite strawberry-blonde with a pretty, round-cheeked face, and a voice that sometimes sounds hesitant. Four years ago, she approached a Saddleback pastor for protection against her husband, who’d violently attacked her while they were driving home from church. Instead of protecting her, Ferber says, the pastor called her husband to warn him that Ferber had been “gossiping about their marriage.” Ferber, it seems, had run into Saddleback’s teaching that the sanctity of marriage prohibits divorce in all but a few circumstances, and domestic violence is not one of them. Abused wives could separate from their husbands, Teaching Pastor Tom Holladay explained in audio clips once available on the church website, but only with the intent to reconcile through church counseling. Read all …
