A few red flags

LES SILLARS, HOST: From WORLD Radio, this is Doubletake. I’m Les Sillars.

Just a caution. Today’s story deals with abuse of many kinds. It’s not for kids.

Kelly Hahn lay on the couch in the living room of her house in Bedford, Virginia. She was pretending to be asleep. Her husband’s truck pulled in around 11 p.m. She could hear him go into the kitchen. Then she heard the crash as he threw the dinner she had made across the room. It was 1999.

HAHN: I’ll never forget it.

He came into the living room and pulled her up by her PJs, ranting that he hated what she had cooked. She started toward the kitchen.

HAHN: He followed me and put his hand around my neck and picked me up, and so he had me choked and off the ground, then he threw me against a chair.

He threw a touch lamp. It shattered. Kelly’s 1-year-old daughter walked toward her, crying. Kelly tried to run to her.

HAHN: He pushed me down …

He picked up her daughter and disappeared into his room. Then returned with a shotgun and held it to Kelly’s head.

HAHN: And I said, “You better not miss.”

Hahn stared straight ahead. After a couple of minutes, her husband ran out of the house. She called the cops. They arrested him, but his mom bailed him out.

This was two years into her relationship with a man who said he was a Christian. What was she supposed to do? The Bible says that God hates divorce. But would you stay married to this person? Would you want your daughter to stay married to this person?

According to one CDC study, about 40% of women in the United States have suffered physical violence from a partner at some point in their lives. That’s anything from being shoved and slapped to being punched, choked, or threatened with a gun or knife. Critics have long argued that progressive researchers’ ideological leanings tend to inflate figures like this, but it’s hard to say it’s not a major problem. Research on abuse in Christian homes is scarce but some believe the stats aren’t much different among believers.

No one, Christian or not, gets married hoping to be abused. But it’s easy to ignore a few red flags if you’re getting something you’ve always wanted. Attention. Affection. Hope for an escape from loneliness or despair. Maybe even something that feels like love. Especially when it’s from someone at church.

And suddenly you find yourself in a marriage that’s not just dysfunctional but destructive. You’re walking through a minefield covered in eggshells, and the horizon is miles away.

So today on Doubletake, a story about one Christian woman’s life on eggshells. Whose longing for love drove her into some destructive relationships. Who discovered how abuse is more hidden and more nuanced under the cover of Scripture.

Patrick Henry College journalism graduate Hannah Gaschler reported and wrote it. It's a really hard story. It’s not clear how common it is, but it might be more common than most people realize. Maybe closer to you than you think.

Along the way, you’ll hear the voices of other women with similar experiences. To be clear, we understand that women are also capable of domestic violence. But that seems to us a different kind of dynamic, a different kind of story. We’re focusing here on situations where the wife is the victim. One more note: you’ll hear a variety of views on divorce in this episode. We’re not presenting a particular view as more biblical than any other. The point is to show how desperate, Christian women often think about the issue. And then maybe we’ll be a little bit better prepared to help them.

With all that out of the way, here’s Hannah.

HANNAH GASCHLER: Kelly Hahn is 45 years old.

KELLY HAHN: I have 4 children. I have been married now 3 times, sadly.

Her mom abused her as a child.

HAHN: My first memory of domestic abuse in my home as a child was at 4 years old.

In fact, there was a lot of abuse in her home. When she was 6, her dad stuck a hot frying pan on her mom’s leg while she washed dishes.

HAHN: They would throw things at each other ‘til there was nothing left to throw, and me and my brother would have to pick them up.

Kelly’s parents divorced in 1986, when she was 7. But then her uncle sexually abused her until she was 10.

HAHN: Nobody knew I was going through that because he threatened to hurt me if I did and hurt my family, and I didn’t want any more pain for anybody, so I just kept it a secret.

She met a nice guy at her first full time job, Bedford Weaving, when she was 17. He was kind. He would open the door for her.

HAHN: He did say he loved the Lord. He said he was saved.

Christians were supposed to be nice, right? Kelly had accepted Christ at age 6. In and out of church after that, she’d seen lots of Christians. Kelly wanted to marry one.

HAHN: I wanted somebody that treated me good, loved the Lord, and would be kind to me. I wanted somebody who’d finally love me, because nobody did that at home, because they were too busy fighting.

So when this guy came along, it felt like she was on the verge of getting everything she ever wanted. Especially the validation that she’d wanted from her father. That she should have gotten from her father. And this man seemed to fulfill that.

HAHN: When somebody gives you attention, and they tell you what you want to hear, it makes it seem like it’s an escape from the horrible. So I idolized being away from my home, whatever I could do to get out of my home.

Not all women in abusive relationships come from rough backgrounds. For example, growing up around Bellevue, Washington, Naomi Lanham had a healthy family.

NAOMI LANHAM: My parents are amazing. My background’s super stable. And I think I took for granted how important that is.

But that didn’t keep her safe from a destructive relationship.

LANHAM: I based my value on whether or not a man wanted me. If I got married young, that was a testament of how incredible of a person I was.

The idea of not being married felt like a failure. Well, Naomi didn’t have to worry about that. She got married at 18 to a husband with a criminal record and an abusive childhood. She wanted to be a safe place for her husband to land.

LANHAM: There’s something you get out of being a rescuer, I think.

During their marriage, she absorbed his rage so that he could interact normally with other people.

LANHAM: I felt like an absorbing buffer between him and society.

The pattern of abuse often worsens after marriage. For Naomi, it took 15 years for her husband’s emotional abuse to escalate to physical abuse.

LANHAM: It’s really unlikely that a man is going to hit a woman until he has convinced her she deserves it.

Once, he grabbed her by her clothes and hair and threw her because she did not find a screwdriver fast enough. He hadn't hit her, but that was the first time he put his hands on her violently. His physical abuse continued until their divorce three years later. The last time he hit her, it was because she said “of course” instead of “ok.” He’d been conditioning her for a while.

Throughout their marriage, he volunteered at a food pantry, gained access to preach in a jail, and talked about starting programs for prison rehab. Their church approached him about being an elder. When Naomi told her pastor and his wife that she was scared, they blamed her.

LANHAM: I felt like they didn’t really know me. … I felt like the only me that they knew was somebody who was misrepresented to them by my ex-husband.

Abusive people often appear very friendly, especially to church leaders. That complicates matters when a wife tries to explain what’s going on at home. Charles Biggs has seen this in his own ministry. He’s a church planting pastor with the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in northern Virginia.

CHARLES BIGGS: What I’ve experienced is where someone comes on too strong and they’re overly interested in me. I’ve found that in a few of those cases, what’s common is that they’re wanting to hide something.

Naomi thought about leaving several times, but it felt like giving up. The Bible condemns divorce. She didn’t want to take the easy way out. But when she did leave? It was scary.

LANHAM: I mean, it’s like quitting your job with no savings and starting your own business. … I don’t know how I did it, because I’m not brave.

At the time of the divorce her ex-husband landed in prison on weapons charges, and the family struggled. She had 60 thousand dollars in credit card debt and seven kids between the ages of 5 and 16.

LANHAM: When we allow any kind of behavior within a sacred institution, that institution loses its sacredness because it becomes a breeding ground for things that are not holy.

Life Coach Jenny Wilma works with women who have been abused—most of them Christians—to untangle their false beliefs. She says every woman’s situation is different. But no matter whom she counsels, each woman holds certain core beliefs.

JENNY WILMA: “I’m not good enough,” “it was my fault,” “I’m not lovable—or God doesn’t love me—because I haven’t been good enough,” or whatever it is.

Her job is to help women uncover the lies they believe and replace them with truth. To be transformed by the renewing of their minds, as Romans 12 says. This process involves intentionally repeating truth to create a new neural pathway.

WILMA: It can be very challenging at times because our brain doesn’t understand this new thing and it’s comfortable and familiar with the old even though the old is not healthy.

This is one reason Naomi’s marriage lasted 18 years. The abuse escalated so gradually, and she adjusted to a new normal. Eventually she cracked—and filed for divorce and a protective order. But for Kelly, whose story we started with, the nice Christian guy she met at 17 turned on her the weekend they got married. Saturday, July 11, 1998. It was four months after she gave birth. She was 19.

HAHN: That weekend, he bought a case of beer, got drunk, and beat me. And that continued pretty much every weekend.

She cried. She begged him to stop. She asked why he was doing this.

HAHN: And he would always apologize. “I’m so, so sorry. I didn’t know what I was doing. I’ll never do it again. I’ll never do it again.” And I would believe him.

Because of her childhood, she assumed every house went through this. Kelly didn’t know how to stop it.

HAHN: All I could do was just cry out to the Lord, “Lord, I just pray that you would stop him. Make him trip when he comes up the stairs. Make the can of beer spill.” … I just wanted my daughter safe.

She faked sleeping to avoid his abuse when he returned from work. That worked until the night he threatened her with his shotgun and she left. She filed for divorce the next day. It had been exactly a year and a month since their wedding. He tried to re-enter her life six months later, promising he’d never do it again. She refused.

After that, Kelly and her daughter moved into a rental property. She volunteered as a Court-Appointed Special Advocate for children coming out of abuse and neglect.

Children imitate what they see in their parents. How can they not? Kelly learned that it’s not easy to break those kinds of patterns.

HAHN: I used to say that all the time, you know, when I watched my mom get beat. I was like, “Oh, I’ll never let anybody do that.”

And yet she did. Kelly’s first marriage ended just like her parents’ had ended–in an explosion. Despite stepping oh-so-carefully on the eggshells.

But her troubles were far from over. She didn’t want to be alone. A single parent. Nobody wants that. So she kept looking, even when prospects seemed a bit dim.

HAHN: It just seemed like every person that I was interested in was abusive or deceitful or—they just had evil intentions.

But five years later, after going to college to study criminal justice and working as a legal advocate, Kelly met the next Christian guy.

HAHN: He says he loves the Lord, respected boundaries, kind, loved my daughter, very involved with his family. So it seemed like, you know, “dream come true”—again.

They dated for a year, then married and had 3 kids. He didn’t abuse her—exactly. He was passive. Completely the opposite of her first husband. That passivity bothered her, especially when their church nominated him as a deacon.

HAHN: He was like, you know, held at a higher regard in our church, but yet at home, he wasn’t leading our family. He wasn’t praying with us, for us. … If there was any spiritual guidance or leadership in my home, it was me.

It was frustrating, but she didn’t know how a godly husband was supposed to act.

HAHN: I had never seen a man lead his home spiritually. I had never seen a man cherish his wife. So why would I expect any different?

That was a good question Kelly asked herself: if she’d never seen a healthy marriage, why should she expect to have one? She didn’t know what they looked like.

Abby McLean had a situation similar to Hahn’s. We’ve changed her name for privacy. She didn’t feel safe at home growing up, and a man at her church noticed.

ABBY MCLEAN: As soon as I turned 18, this 30-year-old man starts telling me that he’s in love with me.

During her first two years of college, they Skyped almost every evening. Sometimes he came to visit her. He smelled bad. Abby felt like she smelled bad from touching him. But she thought showering after hanging out with him would make her a bad girlfriend.

MCLEAN: I was so dumb, but I just wanted to be loved.

When they broke up, she entered her second relationship right away. He wasn’t exactly an upgrade.

MCLEAN: I wanted to, like, help him feel happy and safe. I wanted to care about him. I wanted to help him.

Looking back, Abby realizes that he didn’t care about her, really. Not the way she cared about him. He just wanted someone to meet his needs. Dating him wasn’t easy but somehow she couldn’t tell him no. She wanted to please him. Eventually, she realized that nothing was good enough.

MCLEAN: If I didn’t put my phone away fast enough, he would feel like I was ignoring him. But if I put it away too fast, he would feel like I was trying to make a point about how controlling he was or something. And there was no actual sweet spot.

But Abby hung in there. She doesn’t know why, exactly. When he asked her to marry him, she agreed. He didn’t seem to care much about the wedding, either. She picked the ring …

MCLEAN: It was a $30 ring from Amazon.

…paid for the dress…

MCLEAN: I got a $150 wedding dress off of a sketchy Chinese website.

…wrote the vows to include listening and respecting each other…

MCLEAN: in hopes that saying it out loud would, like, make him do that. It didn’t.

On her wedding day, preparing to walk down the aisle, she thought,

MCLEAN: I don’t wanna do this. … Do I want to be, like, permanently connect to this man who has already caused me so much emotional turmoil and suffering and questioning of myself and is mad at me about any little mix-up or mistake or accident?

Normal wedding jitters, she thought. But you get what you pay for, as they say. He didn’t change. Not a bit. Abby tolerated a lot because that was her Christian duty. As a child, she believed that Christians had to get married and have kids.

MCLEAN: There was this idea deeply embedded in my mind that I had been taught for years and years that marriage is hard, but it’s worth it. … if I just stuck with it, I would have this joyful, ideal marriage that I’m supposed to have.

Abby stuck it out when her husband constantly criticized her. She went to therapy to deal with her anger at him for not helping around the house. Two years into their marriage, her therapist asked, Why are you still married?

MCLEAN: I was like, because I made a promise.

Her husband didn’t like the church she wanted to go to, so they live-streamed his parents’ church. They listened to sermons about wives submitting to their husbands.

MCLEAN: I was trying so hard to be the good Christian wife that I had been told my entire life that I should be.

They even tried couples’ counseling. But he would play along in the session and then blow up in the car driving home. Sometimes, she imagined explaining him to their future kids.

MCLEAN: I realized I was gonna have to sit them down and explain that “Daddy’s giving you the silent treatment, but that doesn’t mean you did anything wrong, he’s just in a bad mood today.” And that I was gonna have to protect them from him.

The breaking point was a haircut. She thought her long hair might have been contributing to her headaches, and she wanted to cut it. But her husband objected. One day, Abby decided,

MCLEAN: He’s gonna be mad at me no matter what I do. So he can be mad at me with short hair.

The day of the haircut, her husband got home from work and saw her new look. He went straight to bed and pulled the blankets over his head. She brought him some dinner, and he half-uncovered his head so he could eat it. While watching TV. Later that night, he said she looked ugly.

MCLEAN: I’m like, this feels super normal, and I don’t think it should feel normal that he’s not looking at me.

Once her therapist asked her when she felt happiest in her relationship.

MCLEAN: And I’m like, “when he has a normal human conversation with me, which happens like five times a year.” ... And then one day when he went to work, I gave him a big hug. He still wouldn’t look at me.

On their sixth anniversary, Abby unplugged the security cameras, moved her things to a friend’s place, and left a letter explaining why she left.

Kelly experienced serious physical abuse in her first marriage. In her second marriage—to the passive husband—she thought she was safe. But eight years in, everything changed. April 10th, 2014.

HAHN: My biggest fear in life was that my kids would endure sexual abuse, like I did.

One day she got out of bed to check if her 15-year-old daughter was up for school.

HAHN: I walked down the hallway and I look into her room—the door wasn’t even closed yet—

Her husband was sexually abusing his step-daughter. After nine months of court hearings, he went to prison for a year and a half.

HAHN: I felt like a failure.

Kelly was yet again a divorced single mother—now of four children.

HAHN: I didn’t wanna go through another thing. I’m like, “isn’t this enough?” So there was many times where I truly got angry at God.

Many Christians would agree that her two divorces are justified on the grounds of physical and sexual abuse. But Abby, the woman who got the haircut, divorced for emotional abuse. Some people don’t think that justifies divorce. She’s not even sure herself. Abby grew up thinking that adultery was the only justification for divorce. But in her marriage, divorce eventually felt like the only option.

MCLEAN: When I finally decided to leave, it wasn’t because my theological views on divorce changed. It was just because I literally could not do it anymore. It got to a point where like, if this is wrong, it’s wrong, but I have to do it or I’m literally gonna end my own life.

Christians differ widely on whether divorce is ever justified. For many Christians, marriage is a sacrament. Once married, always married—in God’s eyes. That’s why the Roman Catholic Church never permits divorce, although it is possible to get an annulment for particular reasons.

Protestant views have a wide range. Progressive denominations permit divorce even for trivial reasons. At the other end, many conservative believers say that divorce is never justified. If you have to separate for safety, so be it. But Jesus said that any man who divorces his wife causes her to commit adultery. Divorce breaks the holy covenant.

Others argue that abuse breaks the covenant. They say the close relationship between a man and a woman and their covenant before God defines the marriage. Permanent separation for them does not take marriage seriously, since it implies that a couple living apart still upholds the covenant.

Abby doesn’t have a clear answer for all this. But, she says, Jesus came to save sinners, and he was kind to people. Including the woman who had had 5 husbands. Or the woman caught in adultery. And Malachi 2:16—the “God hates divorce” verse?

MCLEAN: Whatever that exactly means, I know that if I ran into Jesus on the street, he would be kind to me.

She says she endures physical symptoms of trauma to this day. Chronic headaches, indigestion, tense muscles. She’s also been diagnosed with PTSD, which affects her concentration and gives her nightmares. She struggles to find happiness, and she goes to therapy regularly. Looking back, Abby wishes she would have stood up for herself more. If she had done that, she says she probably never would have gotten engaged to that guy.

MCLEAN: But I’ve also kind of had to forgive myself for that, because I was doing the best that I could with the information and the training that I had at the time.

For Kelly, forgiveness looks different depending on the situation. Forgiving the uncle who sexually abused her as a child meant feeling safe enough to talk about it—which she didn’t do until 8 years ago, with her abuser’s daughter. She wrote a letter forgiving her uncle in 2010, and he committed suicide a few weeks later. Forgiving her second husband meant holding back what she thought he deserved.

HAHN: Every day I had to take my kids to be around him for visits before he was sentenced and had to go to prison. He would be walking through the parking lot, and I was pulling into the parking lot in my van, and it took everything within me not to hit him with my van.

She’s learned that forgiveness is not about the other person.

HAHN: How does God get the glory? It’s because I put down my want for the best interest of my kids. And they need their dad. Whether he’s good or bad, they still need him.

Kelly has also had to seek forgiveness. Her oldest daughter refused to speak to her for 8 years after Kelly learned about the sexual abuse. But several months ago, her daughter called and explained that she had been angry at Kelly for not stopping it.

HAHN: And I say, “Sweetheart, I didn’t know.” I said, “I had no idea what was happening.” … And she said, “I know that now, but I didn’t know that then.”

Her daughter apologized for being angry, and Kelly asked for forgiveness for disappointing her.

HAHN: She said, “I didn’t think you believed me.” And I said, “I had no choice but to believe you. Like why would I not believe you?”

Kelly’s own parents did not believe her when she told them about her sexual abuse as a child. They didn’t want to acknowledge it, so they didn’t do anything.

Kelly says she has now been happily married for two years.

HAHN: He’s leading our home. He cares for my kids like they’re his own—all of ‘em. And he’s probably the most comforting person I’ve met.

Life still isn’t easy. Kelly watches her daughter cope with her past through substance abuse and anger at the Lord. Her daughter also dated an abusive man for five years and was married to him for two, before their divorce in 2025.

HAHN: Why did she settle for an abusive husband? Because she saw it at home.

The women in this story didn’t cause the abuse they suffered. Their husbands alone are responsible. These women also understand that they did not choose godly partners, and they overlooked serious warning signs. They romanticized marriage into a caricature. They weren’t perfect themselves.

But they weren’t wrong that marriage is supposed to be a blessing. A source of hope and even joy. To teach us how Christ loves the Church. And many, many Christians have healthy, happy marriages. Studies report that religious, married couples overall are healthier, happier, and live longer.

Yet for these women, their marriages turned to ashes. And for many Christian women it’s even more confusing because they understand that marriage is supposed to be sacred.

God hates divorce. And He hates abuse. That much is clear. When a woman’s sense of obligation has rotted into a quagmire of guilt and pain, infused with regret, apparently we’re supposed to figure out what to do. We consult Scripture. We pray. And in the end, we all have to throw ourselves on the grace of God.

Kelly’s second ex-husband, who had abused her daughter, often criticized her with Scripture.

HAHN: He would write me letters from the jail explaining to me how I was supposed to be submissive and how controlling that I tried to be and how I am supposed to forgive and forget just like Jesus did.

Her pastor’s wife and counselor kept her accountable as she tried to respond to his letters respectfully.

HAHN: It hurt. There’s things I wanted to say. I wanted to say a whole lot more.

But Kelly also knew she needed to change. And through reading and prayer, she gained a different kind of respect for men.

HAHN: It gave me a view of what to teach my sons to become. It gave me a different direction in what to teach my daughter what to look for. And it gave me a direction of, “Kelly, if God brings someone into your life, you need to know what you’re looking at.”

Kelly says the trials of her broken marriages made her resilient.

HAHN: When we become humble, I think that’s really when we really become healed.

For her, humility looks like acknowledging that she was just as capable of abusing her ex-husbands as they were of her. Kelly got into bad relationships because she expected a fairytale ending.

HAHN: All of my trials came about from me believing a lie. I ended up with the wrong people because I believed lies. My sin takes place because I believe a lie. And I doubted who God really was to begin with.

Kelly says her faith grew, as she learned that she didn’t need human affection to feel satisfied. She says believing that God is enough allows her to see her circumstances as stepping stones. Part of Kelly’s healing journey has come from telling her story. At first, she didn’t want to talk about it.

HAHN: Well when you’re hurt, you many times just wanna sweep it under the rug because it’s easier that way. And you don’t wanna deal with it because you don’t wanna relive it. And that’s what I’ve done for 30 years.

She felt dirty. She felt unworthy of friendship and love. But now she believes that talking about it helps herself and others move forward. Kelly felt the greatest freedom after a year-long recovery program.

HAHN: I cannot explain how painful that was, but how freeing it was. … It allowed me to confess everything that I’d endured and God revealing things in my life… and then it forced me to deal with it.

Hannah Gaschler reported and wrote this story, and I produced it.

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Thanks!

I’m Les Sillars. We’ll see you next time.

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