WHEN I WAS 15, my church youth group was not a safe place. Like most youth groups, there were college-age volunteers who served as counselors and Bible study leaders.
One counselor, Paul, took it upon himself to constantly tell me I wore too much makeup, my clothes were too tight, and that I was a flirt. These actions took place in public for six months while other counselors and students watched and laughed. The interactions came to a head when he commented on my lipstick color and I snapped back at him. He grabbed me, forced me onto his lap, and told me I liked it.
At the time, I just thought Paul was creepy; I now recognize his behavior was sexual harassment. I also recognize that the other members of my youth group, including the leaders, saw his behavior and failed to intervene. Why did this happen? Both Paul’s behavior and the leaders’ silence belong to a larger set of attitudes in our culture—and churches—that allows sexual violence and sexual harassment to become normal, even expected, behaviors.
This set of attitudes is known as “rape culture.” When we fail to confront these toxic attitudes in our churches, we undermine our love for our neighbors, ignore the Bible, and misrepresent God as misogynistic.
The language of “rape culture” emerged in the 1970s as a way for feminists and sociologists to consider why acts of sexual assault were common within U.S. society; since then, it has become an increasingly important phrase for many people working with survivors of rape and domestic violence. While some have raised concerns about the language—fearing that it risks blaming culture instead of the perpetrator—using a phrase such as “rape culture” can help us recognize the broader cultural context surrounding individual acts.
To understand experiences like mine, we must first recognize that rape culture is not just about rape itself, but our reaction to all forms of sexual harassment. This includes:
- Publicly scrutinizing a victim’s dress, history, and mental health
- Refusing to take rape and all forms of sexual harassment seriously
- Defining manhood as aggressive and womanhood as submissive
- Assuming only promiscuous women get raped and that men cannot be raped
- Teaching women to avoid getting raped instead of teaching men not to rape
One of the most blatant examples of these attitudes in the Christian community can be seen in Christian colleges that have usurped the federal Clery Act and Title IX mandates that require universities to report on-campus sexual assault statistics. The New Republic reported that one sexual assault survivor at Patrick Henry College was told by administrators, “The choices you make and the people you choose to associate with, the way you try to portray yourself, will affect how people treat you.” This same survivor was told that the clothes she wears are responsible for “the kinds of ideas it puts in men’s minds.”
This response is not isolated; The Huffington Post reported that students at Bob Jones University were told to call their rapists and ask for forgiveness. And, at the blog xoJane.com, a sexual assault survivor at Pensacola Christian College wrote that she was implored to repent for her ex-fiancé assaulting her.
“Modest is hottest”
It is easy to be outraged by this flagrant disregard for sexual assault victims, but rape culture within the church exists well beyond the campuses of Christian colleges. These harmful practices include how we teach young women about modesty and how we interpret scripture passages containing sexual assault. Though subtle, these practices are equally dangerous.
The modesty message presented to young women in churches often utilizes the same rhetoric that is used to justify sexual assault. Female bodies are often called “a stumbling block” that can cause Christian men to sin. Slogans such as “modest is hottest” teach girls to cover up and obscure their figures, implying that the sexual thoughts of men are the responsibility of women. Many Christian sex books claim that men are naturally more sexual, aggressive, and dominant than women. Instead of teaching men not to rape or encouraging others to intervene in threatening situations, women are taught to avoid getting raped by making themselves less of a “temptation.”
Victim blaming also appears to be the norm in many Christian communities. Every Young Woman’s Battle, a best-selling Christian modesty book, proclaims: “You teach people how to treat you. Either you teach them to treat you with respect or you teach them to treat you with disrespect. Whether you intend to or not, the way you dress—modestly covering the most visually stimulating parts of your body or immodestly revealing as much of your body as you can get away with—sends others a message.” Similarly, some Christian bloggers remind young women that “whatever bait you use determines the type of fish you’ll catch.” Both are examples of ways that people connected to the church sometimes publicly scrutinize women’s dress and justify subsequent mistreatment.
Victim blaming also creates a false dichotomy in which women are viewed as either pure or promiscuous, a good Christian girl or a temptress, a virgin or a whore. Not only does this devalue women who are sexually active or dress in a certain way, but it leads to a painful silence in the church. Those labeled as promiscuous, temptresses, or whores are unlikely to have a voice if they are sexually assaulted; instead, they’re blamed for supposedly bringing the assault upon themselves. For these women, the church is no longer a safe space.
Trivializing the sin of sexual violence
Faulty biblical interpretation can further enforce rape culture. Genesis 16, 2 Samuel 11, and Genesis 29 contain stories of the sexual assault of Hagar, Bathsheba, and Jacob, yet the sexual-assault aspect of these stories is typically ignored.
The focus of Genesis 16 is often on how Abram and Sarai utilized their servant Hagar as a surrogate because they did not trust God’s promise for an heir. But a second look at Genesis 16 shows that Hagar closely resembles contemporary victims of human trafficking. According to the Polaris Project, human trafficking victims are often undocumented, homeless or runaway, impoverished, and oppressed. Similarly, Hagar was an underage slave from a foreign land working for an older couple. Sarai gives her to Abram like a piece of property, and Hagar is then beaten after she is impregnated. Hagar is resentful of being pregnant and fearful enough to run away.
In 2 Samuel 1-12 we read how King David committed adultery with Bathsheba and then killed her husband. Yet it seems Bathsheba thought she could not say no to the king. “When the wife of Uriah heard that her husband was dead, she made lamentation for him. When the mourning was over, David sent and brought her to his house, and she became his wife, and bore him a son. But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.” That God’s displeasure is only directed toward David suggests that Bathsheba was a recognized victim in this situation. David initiated the initial sexual liaison with Bathsheba, and then took away her resources by killing her husband, effectively coercing her into an unwanted marriage.
Finally, in Genesis 29, we read that Jacob was promised to marry Rachel, but was tricked into having sex with her sister Leah instead. Most interpretations of the passage focus on how Jacob was fooled into working longer for his father-in-law, but little is ever said about Jacob’s lack of consent. Jacob was placed in a dark tent and purposefully led to believe he was sleeping with and marrying a different person than the woman who was actually waiting for him. In other words, Jacob’s father-in-law forced him into unwanted sex.
By glossing over the sexual misconduct in these biblical stories, the church misses an important opportunity to talk about the boundaries of appropriate sexual behavior and risks trivializing the sin of sexual violence. After all, if we overlook sexual assault in the Bible, what will prompt us to address sexual assault in our own communities? Worse still, the church’s silence can leave Christians to believe that Bathsheba should not have been bathing on her roof, that Hagar did not mind sleeping with Abram because it was culturally expected for a slave to sleep with her master, and that Jacob was only betrayed. Or, in other words, Bathsheba was asking for it, Hagar does not matter because she is a slave, and rape cannot happen to men such as Jacob.
Though there is no magic solution to address decades of engrained norms about sexual violence, there are ways the church can set itself apart from the world when it comes to our thinking about sexual assault and culpability.
First, the church can emphasize that each person is responsible for his or her own sin. Matthew 5:28 makes it pretty clear that lust is only the sin of the person who is lusting. To be biblically and contextually accurate, Christian communities should stop making women’s appearance responsible for men’s actions. If modesty is taught, lessons should focus on passages such as 1 Timothy 2:10, which instructs that women should be clothed “with good works, as is proper for women who profess reverence for God.” Clothing should enable us to do God’s work. The focus should be, “Can you work in a soup kitchen like that?” not “What will boys think of my outfit?”
Second, the church can be candid about sexual sin in the Bible and our communities. The Bible is made up of stories of humans making deeply flawed decisions. All humans need God’s redemption and love. It is important to acknowledge the sexual assaults described in the Bible and use them as starting points for discussions on consent, sin, and sexual violence. Churches should be a safe space for survivors of harassment and violence. Survivors will know they can receive support regardless of their attire, gender, or sexual history.
When Paul forced me onto his lap, he was pulled aside by my youth pastor’s wife. He was asked to leave and never showed up to any youth events after that. I wonder how things would have turned out for me and other girls in the youth group if she had not intervened.
One thing is certain, however: Challenging rape culture starts with being accountable for our own actions, and it is continued by making churches a safe space for everyone. It means we have to rethink what we teach in our churches and be willing to step up in defense of the vulnerable.
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