American Religion 2, no. 2 (Spring 2021), pp. 148–150 Copyright © 2021, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.2.12 Book Review Megan Goodwin, Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020) Amanda Lucia University of California, Riverside, USA In Abusing Religion, Megan Goodwin offers an incisive rebuttal to the commonplace popular opinion and occasional scholarly assertion that some religions foster abuse while others do not. She writes, “the abuse of American women and children in religious communities is not a religious problem. It is an American one. We protect the shape of America by closing ranks, insisting that abusers are not us. And thus that problem isn’t ours to address. The problem, we insist, is dangerous sex, dangerous religion” (146, emphasis in original). The book illustrates this point by exploring three case studies wherein US public opinion equated the cause of abuse with a minority religion and thereby performed what Goodwin calls “contraceptive nationalism, a strategy that discredits and contains religious and sexual difference by characterizing religious outsiders as sexual predators” (112). Goodwin’s first case study is Michelle Remembers, which became the catalyst for the infamous Satanic Panic of the “long decade between 1980 and the early 1990s” (62). The second is Not Without My Daughter, which enculturated Islamophobia and justified continual decades of war in the Middle East. Third is Under the Banner of Heaven, which directly resulted in the persecution (and prosecution) of fundamentalist Mormons. In each case, Goodwin demonstrates Amanda Lucia 149 that these literary accounts were wildly popular forms of pulp non-fiction that were featured on Sally Jesse Raphael, Larry King Live, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Anderson Cooper 360, 20/20, and the nightly news. While scholars might prefer to discredit such tales as marginal and obviously flawed, it is irrefutable that they hold purchase with the viewing public. In Goodwin’s view, they also serve a social function to insulate and define the nation. She writes, “As a nation, we protect ourselves—or think we do—by condemning dangerous religions that engage in dangerous sex. We tell ourselves stories about what happens when we do sex and religion wrong” (146). Instead, Goodwin urges her readers to face the fact that sexual abuse occurs ubiquitously and is rarely successfully prosecuted in the United States. She writes, “It is hard to overstate how hostile America is to most stories about sexual assault, how little America does to address sexual violence, how seldom Americans intervene in response to disclosures of abuse” (2). Her point, then, is to reveal the radical imbalance, that when so very little is done to combat everyday, commonplace , often domestic forms of sexual abuse in the United States, the American public becomes inflamed, titillated, and aggressively invested in exposing and punishing sexual abuse when it occurs in minority religions. One might imagine, then, that Goodwin would direct scholars to focus their attention on nonreligious spaces that foster everyday abuse, lest scholars focusing on the intersections of religion and abuse unwittingly support contraceptive nationalism. But that is not the case. Instead, Goodwin calls for more attention to the intersections of religion and abuse, and she wrote Abusing Religion in response to silences in the field and in agreement with Kathryn Lofton’s observation that “Given the measure of the crisis, there should be more” (16). But it is hard to see how future scholarship on religion and abuse (not just misaligned accounts of abuse that Goodwin claims either never happened or were gravely exaggerated due to religious prejudice) might avoid the trap of asserting catholic moral values upon minority religions and identifying religious structures as the cause of particular forms of abuse. For sometimes, it is the case that abuse is theologically justified, scripturally authorized, culturally supported, and communally hidden. Sometimes, religious structures support and condone abuse—particularly well. And occasionally Goodwin cedes this point. For example, she writes, “Religious belonging can make abusive situations and relationships harder to escape. Perhaps most significantly, religion can make it harder to recognize abuse as such” (147). But most consistently she argues that abuse happens everywhere, and that minority religious contexts...
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Jul 1, 2024
Maryam Rahmati Andani + 4
Open Access