Tuesday 30 March 2021

on rape, truth, and why the church is silent

My guess is that the reluctance of Christian organisations to address rape culture or the denigration of women is multi-layered.

Even once you get past the 'sexual assault is a woman's problem, not caused by men and male entitlement' line, Christianity has to deal with the "we've been pushing the 'ladies, be modest in your dress so you don't inflame men's desire' for centuries and we can't admit it was wrong because church outsiders might challenge us on other matters of authority" blockage. That's a pretty huge blockage, and the church self-defends against it in every way, shape, or form - and has historically, from the theory of evolution being in opposition to biblical literality, to women's equality being valid and necessary, to it being a sin to be same-sex attracted no matter what you did or didn't do with that attraction.

Once it swallows that, it needs to address "well, obviously a woman being sexually assaulted must be sinning (because of course marital sex isn't rape, and 'good women' don't put themselves in a situation where rape could happen - see 'be modest in your dress...') and we shouldn't be helping to make her sin consequence-free". This is a pretty common 'sin-conflation' among Christian organisations. The premise is that "the problem is that the little sins are the same as big sins in God's eyes" which means there's no essential difference to the church's mind between a woman being sexually active outside of marriage, and a man taking a woman against her will.

And even once they've managed to choke down that idea, there's an attitude of "this is a worldly problem, not a spiritual problem, and church organisations, leaders, or preaching do not in any way contribute to it". Y Helo Thar "Porn Is The Problem", crowd.

Male entitlement, buoyed by the theology of male headship (with corresponding female inferiority), underpinned by a Madonna/whore complex regarding female sexuality? Not even acknowledged, although it underpins many a talk about sexuality and gender in the church and is reinforced by worldly masculinity and advertising.

Oh and then there's the deep-seated perennial mentality of "ew, feminism makes a woman unclean; she can be cleansed of it by the blood of Jesus, but she can't keep the feminism" which dislikes supporting anything with even the whiff of 'feminism' about it. Frankly, feminism is outright sin to the hard end of complementarianism and a 'slippery slope' to the more flexible ones: why, let women think they don't have to submit to the authority of men - let them suppose they're equal and they'll be abandoning their families and thinking they know more about anything than their husbands!

The authority question, incidentally, is also a root of the trans-panic in conservative and complementarian churches; "if we can't define male and female with definitive biology, then how can we be sure that men are given the due authority that their gender entitles them to?"

I don't hate the church or Christians. But I sincerely and truly understand why others do.

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