“It’ll be a cold day in hell before I get my theology from a woman”

Posted: April 13, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Church cultures of abuse, Complementarianism, Gender, Rape and Sexual Assault | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Trigger warning: sexual abuse, ableism.

ABC’s 20/20 aired an exposé on sexual abuse and abuse coverups in Independent Fundamentalist Baptist churches (IFB) last week. Much of it dealt with Tina Anderson’s story, which I wrote about some months ago (link). The first part is posted below, and you can watch the full episode here.

It was pretty well done, and very difficult to watch, especially knowing that these stories are only the tip of the iceberg – not just in the IFB, but in the much larger church culture that the IFB is part of. I kept thinking as I was watching this that the only difference between the IFB and SGM is that the former is somewhat more conservative (e.g., in terms of women’s clothing, and I’m guessing in terms of music, movies, etc.) and more overtly misogynistic. Other than that, the same story could easily have been told about SGM churches. Their teaching on gender roles and the marginalization of women is more or less the same, as are their toxic church cultures, where all kinds of abuse flourish but are kept secret, buried under a thin veneer of “family values.”

It makes me sick to think about how many people have endured this kind of abuse while churches and their members keep themselves willfully ignorant (when they’re not actively enabling it or perpetrating it themselves). Given how few survivors of abuse come forward with their stories, there’s no question that abuse is a much more widespread problem in the church than evangelicals generally acknowledge. I’m convinced that perverted theologies – not just on gender, sexuality, and family life, but also about the nature of God, and of divine and human authority – make patriarchal churches an environment where abusers of all kinds thrive and are protected, while others are forced to endure abuse in silence, and even punished for being survivors of abuse. The whole culture of patriarchal evangelicalism is set up so it’s virtually impossible to acknowledge the existence of abuse in the church, much less to actually name members of the church as abusive. It’s set up so the victim is always partially or wholly to blame for their abuse.

The response of Jack Schaap, a well-known IFB pastor, to the 20/20 exposé illustrates this. He completely ignores the the main focus of the story – that several women were abused, many by more than one person, in IFB churches, and that the IFB has a pattern of responding to survivors seeking help by covering up their abuse and punishing the victim. In one especially awful case, a teenage girl confided in her youth pastor that her stepfather was molesting her, only to have the pastor respond by also molesting her – more than once.

Schaap mentions none of this. The existence of abusers in the church – in IFB families – is completely unacknowledged. The survivors who spoke their truth are treated as nonentities. Instead Schaap makes a story about sexual and spiritual abuse all about him. Worse, he seizes on the story as an opportunity to spew more misogynistic bile (ht Jesus Needs New PR).

[Schaap’s church had the video of his comments taken down from Youtube. Almost as if they were afraid of something. Hmmmm. ETA: Darrell of Stuff Fundies Like has reposted the video with commentary.]

A partial transcript:

Somebody the other day asked me, this reporter, he said, um, “I heard that…it’d be a cold day in hell before you get your theology from a woman. Don’t you think that’s kind of demeaning to the genders?”

I said, “Ask Adam what he thinks about getting his theology from a woman. I said it damned the whole world. I said the reason your soul, sorry soul’s going to hell is because a woman told Adam what God thinks about things.

…I wouldnt get my theology from a woman. I don’t mind if mama teaches the kids. I don’t mind if a strong lady, and a wise woman, and a gracious godly woman follows the, uh, takes the lesson from the pastor – Hey y’all, you listen to me right now, I still believe, it’ll be a cold day in hell before I get my theology from a woman. I’m a preacher. I wasn’t mama-called, papa-sent. No woman ever got me involved in ministry, I didn’t follow a woman into ministry. A woman didn’t write this book, not one woman wrote the scriptures right here. [banging his bible on the lectern] A man wrote the Bible, got it from God, a man hung on the cross, his name is Jesus Christ, and God called a man to lead the church here – [shouting] Hey! I’m glad I’m a man!

…I’m the messenger of the church and what I say is more important than what the news reporter thinks I oughta say. God didn’t call him to tell me what to do, and God didn’t call anybody else, either. You know, if that’s arrogant, so be it.

Can anyone honestly claim that this is anything other than a belief that women are subhuman? Or deny that this kind of theology is a natural and powerful fuel for all kinds of violence against women?* The contempt and hatred Schaap has for women is obvious. My jaw literally dropped open at the point when Schaap starts talking about how the Bible belongs to men. It’s pure, unashamed bigotry, a loud and proud statement of the inferiority of women. I’ve never seen anything like it, at least not in the churches I grew up in. It’s horrifying in its shamelessness.

At the same time, I found it oddly relieving to hear such honesty about the real implications of patriarchal theology. There’s no complementarian bullshitting about how women are of “equal worth” to men, but just have “distinct roles.” There’s no pretense of equality here. There’s no pretense that women have equally valuable contributions to make to the church. Christianity belongs to men. God is a man. The scriptures belong to men. Power and authority belong to men. Truth belongs to men. The right to speak belongs to men. Women have no voice, no part in creating or shaping their own faith, nothing. Women are inferior.

This is what complementarian theology really means, no matter what ridiculous contortions complementarians go through to try to deny it. Teaching that God is male is teaching that other genders are inferior. Believing that women shouldn’t teach or have authority over men necessarily means that women are inferior. Believing that all decision making power in a heterosexual marriage belongs to the husband means that women are inferior. Believing that it’s literally a sin for a woman to have an opinion about the Bible that contradicts male teaching means that women are inferior. At least Jack Schaap is being honest that in his theology it’s better to be a man, instead of lying and trying to have things both ways.

Women matter less than men in patriarchal theology. We are worth less (worthless?). It isn’t a coincidence that there’s an epidemic of abuse of women in the church, and that most churches can’t be bothered to do anything about it – that most blame women for their abuse. It’s the natural product of a theology that teaches that women are less than human.

*Sexual abuse of males and people of nonbinary gender is also a problem in the church, especially of children, which I would argue is also related to theologies that treat children as less than human.

Dear conservative Christians: Rape is not sex

Posted: September 30, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Church cultures of abuse, Rape and Sexual Assault | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Trigger warning.

Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, a young adult novel about a teen girl who is raped, has recently come under fire from a professor at Missouri State University who (to put it mildly) feels the book should not be included in school curricula.  Wesley Scroggins, presumably a conservative Christian and a speaker at a recent “Reclaiming Missouri for Christ” seminar, includes Speak on a list of books he deems “filthy” and “demeaning to Republic education,” whatever that is.  He also claims that Speak and other books “should be classified as soft core pornography,” and complains that “most of the school board members and administrators claim to be Christian. How can Christian men and women expose children to such immorality?”

To talk about a book that depicts two rapes and the devastating effect of rape on a young woman’s life as porn is pretty disgusting, as the author herself points out: “The fact that he sees rape as sexually exciting (pornographic) is disturbing, if not horrifying.”  Unfortunately, it’s also very revealing of how for a lot (not all) of conservative Christians, female consent to sexual activity means nothing or very little.  For a lot of conservative Christians, rape isn’t really rape – it’s sex.

I was reminded, for example, of a study guide (PDF) created by an Iowa Baptist Church for John Ensor’s odious book on Christian singleness and courtship, Doing Things Right in Matters of the Heart.  In discussing sexual “purity,” the guide says the following:

If a chaste man is protecting women, what is an unchaste man doing? Does it make any difference if the woman is willing? (emphasis mine)

In other words, having consensual sex with a woman outside of marriage is just as sinful as raping a woman.  No, scratch that.  It’s actually saying something even worse: that consensual sex with woman one isn’t married to is the same sin as raping that woman. There is no difference.  And by implication, God is totally cool with rapists so long as they stick to raping their wives.

Or take the heartbreaking story of Tina Anderson, who at 15 years old had already survived molestation by her step-father, and who became pregnant after a 38 year old man in her church (“allegedly”) raped her.  Anderson was forced to “confess” to being pregnant in front of her entire church congregation as part of “church discipline” for her “sin” (she was not allowed to tell the church she was raped, of course).  She was sent to live far from home, and coerced into giving up her child for adoption.  She was urged to write a letter of apology to her rapist’s wife (ht Camille Lewis).

[Anderson] says her New Hampshire pastor, Chuck Phelps, told her she was lucky not to have been born during Old Testament times when she would have been stoned to death.  While questioning the girl before church officials crafted the speech she would deliver, Anderson said Phelps’ wife asked her, “Did you enjoy it?”

Anderson’s rapist got away with simply losing his position as a deacon and confessing to “being unfaithful to his wife.”

Rape doesn’t really exist in this world, where all sexual contact, forced or consensual, is sex, and the only distinctions made are between licit sex (straight vanilla sex between a married couple) and illicit sex (everything else).

It’s a world where rape can be seen as titillating, where consent doesn’t make sex any less sinful – and lack of consent doesn’t make sex any more sinful.  A world where raping a minor is the same thing as cheating on one’s wife.  Where a 15 year old girl can be blamed for the “sin” of having been raped, and cast as a temptress and homewrecker.

And it’s a world that owes its continued existence to a church culture that tolerates abuse and teaches that silence is a virtue.  It took 13 years for Matt Barnhart, a former member of Anderson’s church to come forward and alert someone to the cover-up of her case.  It took him 13 years to even get to the point where he and his family left the church, even though he felt from the beginning that the church’s handling of the case was wrong.

Just last year, Barnhart quit his membership after 15 years when his family was in “fierce need” of counseling.  “How can we go to a pastoral staff when we think they might have let the rapist of a 14-year-old go . . . How can they hurt these kids and call themselves a real place that teaches the gospel?”

While it’s good that Barnhart eventually came forward, it’s alarming to think that it took so long for even one person to speak out, and even more alarming that it took Barnhart so long to realize that this church was not a safe space for his family.  It’s scary to think of an entire church tolerating this kind of abuse and being complicit, through their silence, in covering it up.  But, sad to say, I don’t find it shocking.  This is what happens in insular, exclusive church communities that are distrustful of the outside (“secular”) world and preach an easy forgiveness for the most powerful people in the community; where female sexuality is demonized, and female empowerment is seen as a threat.

In such communities it’s almost impossible for people to acknowledge that rape is not sex, or that rape is serious crime that shouldn’t ever be tolerated.