Abstract
In this essay, I recount the recent narrative of an evangelical awakening on issues of sexual violence though the impact of Rachael Denhollander, an advocate and survivor of sexual trauma. Denhollander’s evangelical credentials authorized fellow US evangelicals to sympathize with the #MeToo movement. I then show how this script of awakening obscures a long history of abuse in relation to LGBTQ persons of faith. I demonstrate how American evangelical sex manuals make abuse both constitutive to a genuine discovery of personhood and simultaneously marginal to one’s self-identification. Paradox becomes a framework for describing the “problem” of homosexuality in evangelical circles. Finally, I reflect on what it suggests to scholars of religion that a religious community ensconces abuse in this distinctive way.
Highlights
Evangelical Christians are waking up to the horror and reality of sexual violence in their midst—or so goes a pervasive cultural script in circulation today among insiders and outsiders of US evangelicalism
The divergent pathways outlined in this essay pose a relevant question: is this the only useful analytical lens at the disposal of the scholar? Are there other ways the scholar of religion may diagram and dissect the framework of abuse within religious communities? I have argued that US evangelicalism—and evangelical discourse directed at LGBTQ persons of faith—offers scholars an opportunity to reflect upon this question by distinguishing abuse from abuse*
Evangelical Christians have long advocated for an alternative construction of abuse* that is no less worthy of scholarly attention, if sometimes difficult to uncover through its discrete construction, utilization, and sublimation within the evangelical subculture
Summary
Evangelical Christians are waking up to the horror and reality of sexual violence in their midst—or so goes a pervasive cultural script in circulation today among insiders and outsiders of US evangelicalism. I first recount the dominant narrative of an evangelical awakening on issues of sexual harm and bodily violation though the impact of Rachael Denhollander Denhollander was the former Michigan State University gymnast turned sexual assault advocate who confronted her abuser, Larry Nassar, in 2018. American evangelical Christians interpret so-called divergent lifestyles and their origins by associating queer sexualities with abuse*, despite its lack of any consistent or coherent definition. It is from the context of abuse* that evangelical community standards are enacted through the diagnosis and treatment of queerness. By instilling these community sexual norms, US evangelicalism forms and malforms queers to be, as the King James Bible translates it and as my title alludes, “abusers of themselves with mankind.”
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