When a pastor’s “funny joke” about the wedding night is actually just promoting marital (and non-marital) rape.
“Ladies…Stand there, wear this, do that…”
April is sexual assault awareness month; this piece is dedicated to survivors, of which I am one. Below is a (very) shortened version of the way purity culture groomed me to be raped and sexually assaulted as an adult. I’m not going into graphic detail, but I do address these topics.
Unless you have a very trained ear, on the upcoming episode of the Wise Jezebels, you likely won’t be able to hear me trip over my words, pause, re-start, and go silent on multiple occasions as Tia and I tackle the topic of the now viral video clip of mega church pastor Josh Howerton instructing the women in his congregation to do exactly as their husbands tell them to do on their wedding night (click here to see the video Sheila Gregorie made of it). (Big shout out to our incredible editor Kevin for working his magic once again!) He says that since men have been dreaming of it their whole lives about the wedding night, like women dream about their wedding day, they need to do as they are told, regardless of what they want, feel, or are comfortable with. To be fair, he doesn’t say that last part, but it’s implied. The audience awkwardly claps and laughs. I cringed.
The sermon clip immediately brought me back to 2007 as I drove through the Blue Ridge mountains on my way to Liberty University. I attended there for graduate school and I would fly there several times each year for intensive courses and then fly home to complete the rest of the coursework. It was cheaper to fly into Raleigh and make the 2.5 hour drive to Lynchburg, so I would rent a car and listen to Mark Driscoll’s sermon series, the Peasant Princess. Yes…I did this every time…I wanted to really soak in, uninterrupted, repeatedly, what he was saying. Driscoll had gained much popularity at the time for this series—he was the only pastor around talking about sex. Well, he was the only pastor talking about sex like that.
No holds barred. Explicit. Graphic. Yelling from the stage about what was right and wrong. Telling women to repent and give their husbands a bj…shocking commands to hit the ears of a girl who was committed to wait to kiss until her wedding day!
Truth be told, I was terrified!
Driscoll’s sermons were the most graphic ways I learned about sex, but by the time I heard his teachings, I had well over a decade of indoctrination preceding that, which taught me that sex was not for me. I, as a woman, was not sexual. I mean, I could have sex, my body was made for it, it could turn men on. But it wasn’t supposed to like sex or derive pleasure from it. If it happened, that was fine, but it certainly wasn’t the focus or important.
Sex was for my husband and for procreation. Sex was my duty and obligation to ensure that my husband could stay pure within the marriage—to ensure that he wouldn’t become “addicted” to pornography or tempted to cheat. It was my job to keep his eyes from wandering. If you’re brave enough to look at other clips of Josh Howerton (or many other pastors out there) you’ll see overt and covert messaging toward women and wives that if sex is not happening inside the marriage it is almost always the fault of the woman. In this case, she needs to repent of her sins and have sex with her husband. Even as someone who was never married inside of this fundamentalist system, I was aware and prepared for this role in my life.
It’s important to note here that Driscoll and many other pastors (including Josh Howerton) are not qualified to talk about sex at a level like this. I’m not suggesting that to speak on a subject you MUST be an expert of it or that you must have a lived experience of it. But I am certainly suggesting that if you are speaking from a position of authority—like a pastor is—then you need to have a level of credentials for which you speak. If I were to get up on a stage (or any platform) and begin speaking about chemistry or oncology or environmental issues where I am looked at as an expert to be listened to, it would be appropriate to expect that I have credentials to back that up. I don’t speak to things that I have no business speaking to. And while I don’t believe that people need to listen to me on anything really, I certainly don’t believe people need to bat an eye or lend me any listening time in areas where I have no expertise and experience. (This is a whole other soap box I could get on, but we will save it for another day!)
I say this however not to drag pastors for being uneducated. Many pastors are HIGHLY educated. But they are educated in specific fields (such as theology, biblical languages, Old Testament, New Testament, etc). They aren’t educated, trained, and credentialed as therapists, sex educators, mental health advocates, and trauma. That’s not a pass to allow permission for shitty behavior and teaching. It’s an invitation to ask them to stop talking about areas they have no business talking about from a position of authority. Wanna talk about sex? Great! Have a trained, certified sex therapist come and talk! Wanna talk about how to prepare for the wedding night? Maybe bring in a licensed marriage therapist who specializes in pre-marital counseling!
(I will actually empathize here with pastors and say that many pastors are asked to wear far too many hats and be too many things to too many people. Many pastors are EXPECTED to do things that are outside of the scope of their training, education, and skill set simply because people believe that God called them to the roll of pastor which means that their words matter more. This can feel like a heavy and isolating position. Again, another conversation for another day—I didn’t want to miss the is. It’s also not justification but it’s explanation and that’s something.)
Those messages from fundamentalism and purity culture didn’t go away simply because I left purity culture, fundamentalism, or church. Sex did not become for me when I decided I didn’t need to wait until marriage to kiss…or do anything else. In my head I knew that things changed, but my body hadn’t caught on to the message yet.
The first sexual experience I had, I was lucky. To this day, I am still blown away that it went the way it did—and to be honest, it wasn’t that the actual performances were that great, comparatively speaking…if you catch my drif. They were…fine. What was great was that I was my full, embodied self. And I’ve never felt more confident, empowered, and complete…I was fully me. The guilt and shame that I had been warned I would experience never came and instead was replaced with inherent goodness. That singular experience was an anchor for me to have to ground me so that even when I had experiences (and there were many) that were quite different, I always knew what it was supposed to be. The only word that matches my experience is sunshine.
It went downhill from there—quickly. I was with a man who was abusive and used sex as a tool of abuse, power, coercion, control, manipulation, and many other things, but never love. My body still believed the messages it was taught and ingrained to believe—so when he told me to do and to say and to be and to wear, I complied. Not because I wanted to or because they were coming from a full-bodied yes, but because I believed that was the only option I had.
Even after that relationship ended, situations like that continued. Purity culture had groomed me to believe that this was how it was supposed to be. Despite my greatest efforts and willpower, despite begging to stop, despite saying no every way I could think, despite pretending to be asleep, running away, hiding, crying, panicking, eventually my body knew that the safest thing to do was to stand there, wear this, and do that. Get it over with; dissociation would help.
When I lost my words while recording the podcast the other day (which will be coming out Tuesday, April 9, 2024) what was actually coming up for me was so much anger as I thought of the worst 24 hours of my life. It’s an experience that only a handful of people know of—an experience that I told my last partner of and he never looked at me the same. An experience that an editor told me I couldn’t have in a book because it was too much. An experience where the only person who can look me in the eye and track with me is my best friend because she has one just as bad as me.
And yet we have pastors out here promoting messages that make joke about messaging that creates the very dynamics that led to what happened to me?!?
And the thing is, I know it’s not just me.
Because I’ve heard the stories in my office. And my DMs. And my comment sections. And other authors who have had their editors say the same things to them.
That their lived experiences are too much for readers to comprehend or to listen to.
So we have to water them down, take them out, and say it was a dark 24 hours.
And then suppress our anger and rage when we are told that we are making too big of a deal for a pastor saying “Stand here. Wear this. Do that.”
After everything was done during those dark 24 hours (referenced above) and my brain started to come back online and try to make sense of all that had happened—which is what brains are supposed to do—my very first thought was “this happened because my shorts were too short.”
My next thought was that it happened because I had been sexually active with my boyfriend and had not been valuing my virginity the way I had been taught and so I deserved to be raped.
And while I know that the line between rape culture and purity culture is thin (if existent at all), I know that for me, those beliefs and rationales began when I was sitting in youth group learning about being a chewed up piece of gum if I decided to have sex before marriage. In an out of body experience I watched what felt like purity culture take over my body in an attempt to make sense of a situation that was so overwhelming, so bizarre, so far out of the realm of what the human mind could have dreamt up. …only purity culture gave me rational logic for it, which was the only way I could survive at that moment in time.
As a survivor of rape, sexual assault and purity culture, there was a lot to resolve in my body. But for me personally, the sexualized violence felt easier to resolve than the way purity culture did. Purity culture was baked into me; it was in my bones, coursing through my veins. Even after I allowed myself to create a new ending and come to completion for the specific acts of sexualized violence, those purity culture messages still reared their ugly heads and it was often difficult to not let them get their hooks in me.
It took me a long time and a lot of work in therapy to get to a point where I had resolved not only the specific incidences of sexualized violence but also learned how to integrate the complexity of the trauma from purity culture into my day to day life. I had coping skills and tools, safe relationships, awareness…all the things.
My therapist finally looked at me one day toward the end of one of our sessions and said… “ya know, I think it’s time…” I pretended to be confused as to what she meant, but I knew exactly what she meant. She was saying what I hoped and dreaded she would say: I needed to start practicing…in real life.
(For those of you who are about to be horrified and think that my therapist was forcing me to go out and have sex, don’t worry, she was not. I had already indicated this was something I wanted to do and something I was working toward…and I also felt 100% confident to tell her I wasn’t ready and knew she would have respected that if I would have said so!)
She reminded me that I was already doing all of the things that I needed to find safety within myself, that I had support and connection, practiced boundaries, knew how to use my voice, resolve things in my body and that I could go slow. I nodded…she was right.
And I was ready. I was already talking to someone—he had a similar religious background and was versed in purity culture. It felt safe…and like the first sexual experience I had, was rather unremarkable, but was a reintroduction to my inherent goodness and I began to feel the sunshine again.
One of the biggest areas I still grieve is sex. In my adolescent years and most of my 20’s, I was completely sexually repressed. In my late 20’s and early 30’s, I experienced so much sexualized violence which resulted in trauma…which meant that the majority of my 30’s were spent healing from that and frequently that meant long periods of (chosen) abstinence. I certainly do not believe I am old, but I am not under any illusion that the sex drive of a 40-year old is the same as a 20-year old (though I think it’s safe to say my 40-year old sex drive is higher than my 20-year old sex drive due to purity culture…oooookkkkkkayyyy! Did not see that one coming! No pun intended!)
I do not try and stop myself from being angry or sad about this—I think both the anger and sadness show how important these things were and that they shouldn’t have happened. I just don’t live on the anger and sadness.
They come up from time to time still…like when we see clips like Josh Howerton’s sermon or I hear Mark Driscoll’s voice. Nowadays, I use that to fuel me to speak out on how harmful purity culture is—that it’s not just “no sex before marriage” but so much more. That it’s harmful. And that “stand here. Wear that. Do this” is not a joke and actually grooms us for so much more.
We need to keep speaking out about it. We do not need to be silent. We do not need to pretend it’s just a joke, that it’s not “that bad”, or that we’re making too big of a deal of it. It’s necessary to call it what it is. I’m proud to stand among many brave individuals who do not let things like this pass.
Sexual assault, rape or any sort of sexualized violence, including purity culture and the impact of it is not a laughing matter. If you or anyone you know needs individualized support, please consider scheduling a free inquiry call today with one of the practitioners at the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
I’m sick and sad that women go through the humiliating experience of having some man who knows nothing about women and nothing about them get up in front of a group and loudly tell them to basically allow their bodies to be used. I follow Jesus but do not attend church and the word “pastor” even makes me sick. I don’t need an overseer in my spiritual life and I definitely don’t need one who laughs at rape.
Thank you for sharing your story and the passion with which you speak out. It is not a joke and these pastors need to know that the advice they are giving is directly leading to rape for some of their listeners.