Christians Must Face the Reality of Rape Culture

By Beth Allison Barr
Patheos blog
January 23, 2019

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2019/01/christians-must-face-the-reality-of-rape-culture/


I am so pleased to welcome guest blogger Leslie Hahner, PhD, to The Anxious Bench today. Leslie is a brilliant thinker, writer, and professor. I know this because we have been in an interdisciplinary writing group together since 2011. She has two recently published books, To Become an American: Immigrants and Americanization Campaigns of the Early Twentieth Century and Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the Alt-right. Her current book project, which she is writing with fellow Baylor professor Scott Varda, focuses on how individuals deny the existence and pervasiveness of sexual assault. Today, Leslie Hahner offers her insights on what the church is called to consider.

In October 2017, actress and activist Alyssa Milano tweeted a note that asked those who had “been sexually harassed or assaulted” to reply “‘me too’” to her tweet. Within one day, the “post received more than 38,000 comments, 13,000 retweets and 27,000 likes.” The responses then spread from Twitter to Facebook and Instagram. The expanse of the problem, as Sophie Gilbert wrote in the New York Times, could be grasped once the public woke “up to a feed dominated by women discussing their experiences of harassment and assault.” Inspired by Tarana Burke, the hashtag had spawned a movement, a public insistence from thousands that sexual violence was pervasive, systematic, and unabated by current measures of justice. Sparked by the vicious actions of Harvey Weinstein and others, the #metoo movement began to demonstrate the expanse of rape within a culture that enabled the perpetuation of sexual violence.

Within in a short time, #churchtoo would open the eyes of the faithful to the ways sexual assault was also part of religious communities. Men, women, and children would all voice their own violent histories from other members of their congregation and even members of the clergy. Of course, substantial research has already indicated that 3% of adult women have experienced sexual misconduct from members of the clergy. #Churchtoo takes up this truth and insists that sexual misconduct has been ignored and excused by the church. The fallout witnessed the resignation of Andy Savage, the retirement of Bill Hybels, the prosecution of certain Catholic priests and nuns, and a whole host of other events.