UNITED STATES
The Huffington Post
December 4, 2017
By Hannah Paasch
And purity culture teaches women that it’s all their fault.
“Do I out my high school abuser?” she typed into the group chat on the night #ChurchToo was born. “Probably, huh?”
I knew the weight behind this seemingly nonchalant question. Years ago, when I first met Emily Joy, a college freshman at Moody Bible Institute, she was fresh off the evangelical assembly line. While still decidedly her own person, she had been indoctrinated with some views about holding hands with boys so strange that even my sheltered mind couldn’t quite wrap itself around them.
It took a few months of the late-night coffee dates and Bible school sleepovers that made up our budding friendship before she revealed her secret to me: that a church youth leader had groomed and manipulated her into a romantic relationship at the age of 16.
When the truth came to light, it was Emily who had been censured by her peers in the youth group, punished by her parents and generally ostracized from the cult of good reputation at her local megachurch. The last years of her teens were spent keeping to herself on the outskirts of the church and — thankfully for the world — writing a lot of angry poetry.
She told me of other victims who had suffered at the youth leader’s hands. Their names would echo through my head at the most inopportune moments: in the middle of chapel, in systematic theology class. The cognitive dissonance was jarring.
Recently, as allegation after allegation surfaced against powerful men in Washington and Hollywood, Emily and I realized that it was time to create space for survivors within the evangelical church and for those who have left its walls. So we launched #ChurchToo, a Twitter hashtag that quickly drew out widespread stories of sexual abuse and harassment. It was a reckoning.
For me, it was also the culmination of years of speaking out against and unlearning the strictures of evangelical purity culture.
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