The relationship between religious and spiritual factors and the perpetration of intimate personal violence

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a multifaceted social issue that affects the Christian faith community as it does the secular community. Though the literature reflects some understanding of general correlates and possible antecedents to IPV within the Christian community, the impact of religious and spiritual factors tends to be homogenized and is often misjudged. Allport\u27s theory of intrinsic and extrinsic religious orientation provided a platform for investigating Christian male-perpetrated IPV. This quantitative study utilized survey design and measured the impact of 10 select religious and spiritual factors on the probability of physical or sexual IPV perpetration. Archival data from Wave III of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health were used and included male participants ages 18 to 26 who nominally classified themselves as Catholic, Protestant, or Christian. Data were analyzed using binary logistic regression and results indicated that IPV perpetration could not be predicted from the 10 religious or spiritual factors. Given the geographic breadth and the size of the sample utilized, not finding a predictive model suggests there may be a lack of consistency in religious and spiritual orientation in these young males and elucidated analysis problems resulting from multicollinearity and the use of ordinal data. Though a predictive model for Christian male-perpetrated IPV was not found, the results of this study can contribute to social change by challenging existing ecclesiastical paradigms regarding which religious or spiritual factors, if any, impact Christian male-perpetrated IPV and which religious and spiritual factors should be addressed in faith-based batterers\u27 programs targeting young adult males