By B.D. McClay
I encourage anyone reading this to take a look at the entire piece. It's a powerful and beautiful take on rape culture and the #MeToo movement from a Christian perspective. Here are a few highlights:
Do women matter? The answer, at least in these responses, seems to be no. They can be part of a functioning sexual system (by facilitating marriage), occasions of sin (by tempting men to rape them), or an opportunity for men to prove their virtue (by not raping them); they can also be collateral damage in upholding the name of a distinguished institution (or weapons wielded against the same). But that women actually matter for their own sake doesn’t seem to be on the table. Certainly they do not matter as much as a university, or matter enough to be treated as more than fodder in culture-war debates.
But whether or not you buy the line that rape isn’t about sex but rather power, rape isn’t simply about sex. It’s an act of violence against another person, one which uses sex as a tool. This is what makes it evil, and also why it can continue to exist within the confines of marriage.
No act of bodily violence can violate chastity, Augustine states by way of argument against those who think raped women must kill themselves.
That Augustine offers women in these situations something more humane than suicide should not be discounted. However imperfectly, he is making a strong claim that women are more than their bodies or their sexual purity. But he’s also an object lesson of what happens when rape is understood as a sin against chastity rather than an act of violence, and creates a situation in which a victim of violence can be mutually engaging in sin, or reasonably suspected of such, no matter what she says or does.
But the line of questioning that led them there, and the idea that consent or lack thereof can be presumed by a drink, a dress, or by “putting yourself in the situation,” is diseased, and modern-day people who follow it have less excuse for their mistakes than Augustine.
But the line of questioning that led them there, and the idea that consent or lack thereof can be presumed by a drink, a dress, or by “putting yourself in the situation,” is diseased, and modern-day people who follow it have less excuse for their mistakes than Augustine.
Women’s suffering is equal to men’s suffering, their moral worth to men’s moral worth, their souls to men’s souls, and their sins neither greater nor less than men’s sins. They deserve justice, not as pieces in a sexual economy, not merely because of the harm doing evil does to men, but as human beings. They matter as much as men do—and like men, they have an advocate in Christ, if not always in his earthly representatives.
