The respondents consistently consulted biblical narratives with which they were familiar in which suffering, abuse, and the testing of one’s faith are experienced or interpreted in biblical characters, events, and teachings. The biblical stories and teachings suggest desirable and rewarding outcomes for those whose faith is tested and who remain steadfast in the face of adversity. Each woman also referenced multiple concerns and limitations from her past and the present apart from her abuse that encouraged belief in supernatural or miraculous resolutions of her difficulties. Each woman had a history of using religion to interpret problematic events. There is a sense that God is a constant ally and authoritative guide through the Bible for how to manage adversity. This frame of reference was particularly appealing in the absence of social support or a feeling of personal inadequacy. These religiously based coping strategies, however, tended to keep the women in the abusive marriage under the belief that God would change the husband’s behavior and resolve the conflict while keeping the marriage, a sacred commitment, intact. By deconstructing abused religious women’s strategic and interpretive processes in coping with abuse, researchers might identify a complex coping pattern that has too easily been disparaged as non-confrontational and passive, when in reality it is imaginative, proactive, and mentally and emotionally restorative. 49 references