Jesus, Mary, and Roy
We are in the midst of advent, less than two weeks until Christmas. Americans from all 50 states are breathing a sigh of relief. We owe our renewed optimism about the future of our country to Alabama’s African Americans, 96% of whom voted for Doug Jones and against Roy Moore, a man credibly accused of harassing and molesting teen girls when he was in his 30’s.
Americans are looking at white evangelical Christianity in America with fresh eyes today. Donald Trump rose to power with 80% of the evangelical vote and Roy Moore got 81% of the evangelical vote. Evangelical leaders expressed support for both men, despite undeniable evidence of their history of sexual harassment and abuse.
It became abundantly clear during the race for the Alabama Senate seat that Donald Trump, the current head of the Republican party, is politically beholden to the branch of Christianity descended directly from the religion of the slaveholding South. The white evangelicals who propelled Donald Trump to victory descended from the Confederates who fought to secede. Roy Moore campaigned for Alabama Christian votes by painting Doug Jones as a liberal ally in the “War of Northern Aggression.”
In the first year of his presidency, Donald Trump has let the world know he has taken the side of Russia in the Cold War and the South in the Civil War. He is avenging their defeats by championing their cultures, appointing judges sympathetic with their causes, furthering their agenda, and openly mocking the resistance. Any humiliation Southerners endured in the wake of their defeat in the Civil War is now, under the Trump Presidency, a distant memory. Most days he tweets out a message intended as a salve for their wounded egos.
With Trump’s presidency, our entire country, indeed the entire world, is paying a severe price for every moral compromise Americans have ever made to indulge the grudges and resentments of the white evangelical Christian South. The stakes could not be higher. Serial sexual abuser Donald Trump leveraged the Christian presumption of “father knows best” paternalistic benevolence all the way to the White House, where he commands a nuclear arsenal with the capability of destroying the planet many times over.
Now that we can see plainly that white evangelicals will not hesitate to cast their vote for white male sexual predators, it makes sense to take a closer look at their history.
It was white church-going Christians in the American South, mostly Baptists, who bought and sold boys and girls, men and women; using passages from the Bible to justify atrocities. Slavery in America was a harsh and dehumanizing system that used Christian scripture to justify severe corporal punishment, rape, torture, and the sale of human beings as chattel.
Southern Baptists like Roy Moore have always maintained a sanctimonious veneer of morality. They don’t drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, or use profanity. They talk endlessly about the importance of the 10 Commandments, the power of prayer and the “sanctity of life.” But scratch the surface and it becomes obvious that the pious veneer has always masked profound moral rot.
Frederick Douglas warned Americans of the dangers of Southern Christianity in 1845 when he published”Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas: An American Slave.” Throughout his narrative, Douglas described severe atrocities committed against him and people he knew by Christian slave owners. His firsthand account along with his robust organizing efforts helped the abolitionist movement gain critical mass. He concluded his personal narrative with this prescient Appendix:
I find, since reading over the foregoing Narrative. That I have, in several instances, spoken in such a tone and manner, respecting religion, as may possibly lead those unacquainted with my religious views to suppose me an opponent of all religion. To remove the liability of such misapprehension, I deem it proper to append the following brief explanation. What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference — so wide, that to receive the one as food, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, woman-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and Christianity of this land. Indeed, I see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels. Never was there a clearer case of ‘stealing the livery of the court of heaven to serve the devil in.’ I am filled with unutterable loathing when I contemplate the religious pomp and show, together with the horrible inconsistencies, which everywhere surround me. We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members. The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be the minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. The man who robs me of my earnings at the end of each week meets me as a class-leader on Sunday morning, to show me the way of life, and the path of salvation. He who sells my sister, for purposes of prostitution, stands forth as to the pious advocate of purity. He who proclaims it a religious duty to read the Bible denies me the right of learning to read the name of God who made me. He who is the religious advocate of marriage robs whole millions of its sacred influence, and leaves them to the ravages of wholesale pollution. The warm defender of the sacredness of the family relation is the same that scatters whole families, — sundering husbands and wives, parents and children, sisters and brothers, — leaving the hut vacant, and the hearth desolate. We see the thief preaching against theft, and the adulterer against adultery. We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen! All for the glory of god and the good of souls! The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slaves are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals on the slave-trade go hand in hand together. The slave prison and the church stand near each other. The clanking of fetters and the rattling of chains in the prison, and the pious psalm and solemn prayer in the church, may be heard at the same time. The dealers in the bodies and souls of men erect their stand in the presence of the pulpit, and they mutually help each other. The dealer gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit, and the pulpit, in return, covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity. Here we have religion and robbery the allies of each other — devils dressed in angel’s robes, and hell presenting the semblance of paradise.
Tragically, five years after Douglas published his narrative, the United States Congress made a compromise with the South by passing the Fugitive Slave Act that mandated all escaped slaves were, upon capture, to be returned to their masters. It became known as the “Bloodhound Law” for the dogs that were used to track down runaway slaves.
Had Congress exercised moral leadership in 1850 and taken a stand against Christian slavers rather than in support of them, our history would have been much different. In the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act, former slaves became less enamored with the Christianity of the North. As Linda Jacobs wrote in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in 1861,
Are doctors of divinity blind, or are they hypocrites? I suppose some are one, and some the other; but I think if they felt the interest in the poor and the lowly, that they ought to feel, they would not be so easily blinded. A clergyman who goes to the south, for the first time, has usually some feeling, however vague, that slavery is wrong. The slaveholder suspects this, and plays his game accordingly. He makes himself agreeable as possible; talks on theology, and other kindred topics. The reverend gentleman is asked to invoke a blessing on a tableloaded with luxuries. After dinner he walks round the premises, and sees the beautiful groves and flowering vines, and the comfortable huts of favored household slaves. The southerner invites him to talk with those slaves. He asks them if they want to be free, and they say, ‘O, no,massa.’ This is sufficient to satisfy him. He comes home to publish a ‘South Side View of Slavery,’ and to complain of the exaggerations of abolitionists. He assures people that he has been to the south, and seen slavery for himself; that it is a beautiful ‘patriarchal institution;’ that the slaves don’t want freedom; that they have hallelujah meetings, and other religious privileges.
What does he know of the half-starved wretches toiling from dawn till dark on the plantations? Of mothers shrieking for their children, torn from their arms by slave traders? Of young girls dragged down into moral filth? Of pools of blood around the whipping post? Of hounds trained to tear human flesh? Of men screwed into cotton gins to die? The slaveholder showed him none of these things, and the slaves dared not tell of them if he had asked them.
This is what we need to learn as Americans. Every time we indulge and ignore Christian atrocities, abuses, and willful ignorance on the grounds of “religious freedom,” we lose. Every time we romanticize Christianity as a spiritual salve and fail to oppose it as a political force when it seeks to violate civil and human rights, we lose.
Christianity is without a doubt the dominant religion in our country. The tree of Christianity has thousands branches with common roots. It is fair to say all Christians celebrate Christmas. In the wake of the Alabama Senate campaign, it seems more than fair to gaze upon the Christmas nativity scene with fresh eyes. Should we really be surprised that Christians who worship a God who impregnated a teen married to an adult would vote for Roy Moore? There is no better time that right now to step back and look at how the story of Christmas has shaped our national psyche in ways that have always threatened the autonomy of American girls and women.
It is becoming increasingly difficult for progressive Christians quietly ignore the inconvenient truth that Mary was under the age of consent when God “overshadowed” her. Of course Biblical authors did not understand adolescent psychology and the dynamics of consent as we do. They interpreted Mary’s submission as permission. But we know better. We can read the story and understand that Mary was exploited by the Biblical God.
If we follow the Biblical narrative, teen Mary was not asked to become the Mother of God, rather she was informed by God’s Angel Gabriel it would happen. Mary was not surrounded by friends and family when Gabriel approached her, rather she was blind-sided while alone and he did not leave her until she submitted in spite of her fear. Mary was not afforded time to deliberate whether or not she wanted to become a mother nor was she encouraged to consult with trusted adult counselors. She and her husband did not have a conversation about the proposed pregnancy. Joseph too was blind-sided and given no say as to whether or not he wanted to become the earthly father of God’s son. Mary was a virgin with no real idea what pregnancy and childbirth would do to her body, mind, and soul. An authoritarian God imposed pregnancy on her, exploiting her for his theological agenda.
Hannah Paasch is an ex-Evangelical who launched #churchtoo on twitter for men and women who endured sexual abuse and were damaged by abstinence-only purity culture teachings. She observed in a twitter thread,
To relent is not to consent.Wearing someone down is not consent. The boundary assaults come from all sides. The abuser is trying to figure out how to get in. It is a multi-sensory ambush. Once you relinquish, you begin to feel like you have no right or would be inconsistent or silly to try and maintain another. Then there’s the underlying knowledge in most cases, I can’t take this guy. If this escalates, I am getting more hurt. so we ‘cave.’ For our own safety and in the heat of the moment, we allow X thing to happen to avoid suffering X AND Y. Abusers try all these different tactics to see what they can get away with. By keeping you guessing, they find their way in.
The annunciation in a nutshell.
During the Alabama Senate campaign, in interviews and public speeches Moore maintained that the same sex marriage of consenting adults is one of the chief factors contributing to America’s decline. Moore said nothing negative about child marriage, a practice with known dangers to girls in conservative Christian communities and across the globe. UNICEF reports:
More than 700 million women alive today were married as children. More than 1 in 3 — or some 250 million — were married before 15. Girls who marry before they turn 18 are less likely to remain in school and more likely to experience domestic violence. Young teenage girls are more likely to die due to complications in pregnancy and childbirth than women in their 20s; their infants are more likely to be stillborn or die in the first month of life…..
Evidence shows that girls who marry early often abandon formal education and become pregnant. Maternal deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth are an important component of mortality for girls aged 15–19 worldwide, accounting for 70,000 deaths each year (UNICEF, State of the World’s Children, 2009). If a mother is under the age of 18, her infant’s risk of dying in its first year of life is 60 per cent greater than that of an infant born to a mother older than 19 (UNICEF, State of the World’s Children, 2009). Even if the child survives, he or she is more likely to suffer from low birth weight, under nutrition and late physical and cognitive development (UNICEF, State of the World’s Children, 2009). Child brides are at risk of violence, abuse and exploitation (UNICEF, State of the World’s Children, 2009). Finally, child marriage often results in separation from family and friends and lack of freedom to participate in community activities, which can all have major consequences on girls’ mental and physical well-being.
Where prevalent, child marriage functions as a social norm. Marrying girls under 18 years old is rooted in gender discrimination, encouraging premature and continuous child bearing and giving preference to boys’ education. Child marriage is also a strategy for economic survival as families marry off their daughters at an early age to reduce their economic burden.
It can be difficult to grasp just how normalized child marriage is in Trump’s most solid evangelical base. The evangelicals who swept Trump to victory and voted for Roy Moore embrace “purity culture.” In purity culture innocence and naiveté are fetishized to a great degree. Girls are groomed as early as 12 for courtship and marriage. Beginning in puberty they are sexualized — told they need to cover up and be modest to prevent men from lusting after them.
It is estimated that 5 out of every 1,000 American teens aged 15–17 is married in the United States and a high percentage of those were raised in Christian homes. Teen wives in the US are as at risk as teen wives across the globe for abuse, pregnancy complications, reduced economic prospects, and more. As one ex-evangelical woman shared with me:
Grooming girls for marriage only is just plain wrong. What happens if their husband dies? Or becomes disabled? Can’t work, can’t find work or won’t work? What happens if he leaves her or the relationship becomes abusive and she has to leave for her own safety? She has no job skills, no knowledge on how to handle finances. She is clueless. This is my story. No job skills, no knowledge of how to handle money, no life experience and I was trapped in a super abusive marriage. I had no idea how to survive without him. He kept me isolated from everything and everyone. Marriage grooming is just plain evil and keeps women under the control of men. This practice is wrong and causes great harm.
My first husband, who I met at a prominent Christian University, was very abusive. I was not prepared to survive without a man. My church tried to send me back into the relationship and blamed me and my “Jezebel spirit” for the bruises he gave me. I did manage to divorce him. I remarried and my second husband committed suicide. I was stuck with a son and daughter under the age of six .You never know what life will do to you. To expect young women to be taken care of perpetually by a man is just plain wrong
To give a flavor for the tenor of conservative white evangelical thoughts on teen brides, consider this excerpt from Matthew Chapman reflecting on 15 years of marriage — Chapman was 26 when he began courting his wife Maranatha who was 13 at the time. They married when Matthew was 28 and Maranatha 15:
I know that in my case, I cannot even begin to fully communicate the wonderful gift Maranatha’s father gave to me in his daughter on the day we married. All her life, he had called her to trust him and follow him, even when she didn’t understand or, perhaps, even agree with how he was leading her, and she did. A few nights before our wedding feast, when Maranatha was dressed and ready and waiting for me to come, the doorbell rang and it was her dad who showed up instead. He assured her the wedding feast was not that particular night, and asked her to change her clothes and join him for a special dinner. He took her to a nice restaurant where they had a wonderful evening talking and sharing and laughing and crying together. Then, at one point, he told her, “Sweetheart, all your life you have submitted to me, trusted me, and followed me, and you have done this well. But, when Matthew comes and takes you, all of that transfers over to him, even if that means he leads you in ways that vary from how I would do things.” And when I went to get her, she followed her dad’s final lead right into my headship of her. Wow! Did I walk into a good deal or what?! I’ll tell you what though, having a wife with a heart like that makes you all the more want to seek the Lord and lead her faithfully.
For assistance connecting the Christmas story to the exploitation of Christian girls and women in the United States, here are Matthew Chapman’s thoughts on grooming teen girls for marriage. He writes:
Parents, I would also charge you to consider this. The way many Christian homeschooling parents raise their daughters, they mature rather quickly and develop significant capacities by a relatively young age. By their middle-teens, many daughters (but by no means all) possess the maturity and skills to run their own home. My point is to encourage you to be open to the Lord and take to heart that some of your daughters may be ready to marry sooner than your preconceived ideas have allowed for. And why not, if they are truly ready? What is the purpose of holding out for a predetermined numeric age if they are legitimately prepared and the Lord has brought His choice of a young man along for her? Don’t be surprised if this is some of the fruit of your good parenting in bringing forth mature, well-equipped, Godly young daughters. However, I seldom think this will be the case for most young men — it takes them (us) a lot longer to get to where they need to be. I have also seen that, oftentimes, a difference in age — even a significant one — with the man being older, helps make for a better fit.
This argument in favor of contemporary child marriage closely mirrors arguments made defending the Christian God’s impregnation of Mary when she was a teen married to Joseph, an adult. Christian apologists contend Mary was ready for marriage at 12 and motherhood no older than 16 because she had acquired the skills required from the culture in which she was raised. Note that Chapman does not seem at all concerned with how delaying marriage could have benefitted his wife. Most of the 2.4 billion Christians in the world adopt a similar attitude towards Mary — not at all considering whether or not marriage and motherhood were in HER best interests.
In the wake of Roy Moore’s Senate campaign, perhaps the “War on Christmas” is not something that should trouble us, but rather inspire us to think again about what we really want for teen girls in our country. We cannot go back in time and change how early Christians thought about child marriage and teen pregnancy. We can, however, recognize that Donald Trump’s white evangelical Christians want us to continue to perceive teen girls primarily as future subservient wives and mothers. To them, Moore was not a creepy pedophile but a man with a stable career who courted “pure” teen girls.
Rev. Flip Benham, a seasoned and extreme Christian anti-choice activist had this to say :
“Judge Roy Moore graduated from West Point and then went on into the service, served in Vietnam and then came back and was in law school. All of the ladies, or many of the ladies that he possibly could have married were not available then, they were already married, maybe, somewhere. So he looked in a different direction and always with the [permission of the] parents of younger ladies … He did that because there is something about a purity of a young woman, there is something that is good, that’s true, that’s straight and he looked for that.”
Note that Benham believes parents can and should give their “pure” daughters as young as 14-years-old permission to court adult men. As is typical of anti-choice activists, Benham centers the desires of men, not caring how considering marriage with an adult could harm a teen girl.
Roy Moore defender Alabama state auditor Jim Zeigler made headlines on November 9 when he compared Roy Moore’s predatory conduct to the relationship between Mary and Joseph. Zeigler told the Washington Examiner, “Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus. There’s just nothing immoral or illegal here. Maybe just a bit unusual.”
Keith Burgess-Jackson, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Arlington wrote in a blog post “My maternal grandmother was 15 years old when she married and 16 years old when she conceived her first child…..Her husband was 41 and 42….. This was normal back then.”
Throughout history and across cultures, there have been many atrocities and abusive practices made normative. Not enough of us are outraged by child marriage, not enough push back against anti-gay marriage rhetoric with condemnations of religiously sanctioned child marriage.
Here we get back to the 96% of African Americans who voted against Roy Moore in Alabama. The United States Congress prohibited the importation of slaves in 1808. As of statehood in 1819, slaves accounted for more than 30 percent of Alabama’s approximately 128,000 inhabitants or approximately 40,000 slaves. The slave population more than doubled during the 1820s and again during the 1830s. When Alabama seceded from the Union in 1861, the state’s 435,080 slaves made up 45 percent of the total population.
Overall in the south, the slave population increased from 1.1 million to nearly 4 million between 1810 and 1860, just under four-fold in 50 years without any legal slave imports from Africa. How did the slave population increase more than ten-fold in Christian Alabama in just over 40 years? Partially through what was known as the "second great migration" when nearly one million slaves were relocated from the upper South to the lower South, two-thirds of whom were sold through the domestic slave trade.
Moreover, the slave population increased by rape. According to the Gilder Institute of American History, in the United States, on average, a slave mother gave birth to between 9 and 10 children. White Christian slaveholders, of whom there were more than 33,000 in Alabama when slavery was abolished, bred slaves like livestock. Masters raped their slaves and sold their children. They purchased female slaves to rape and male slaves to work as studs. Slave men and women also formed loving families where children were conceived consensually. But those children were born into slavery and could be, and often were, legally sold away from their parents. Of course black Alabamans believed Roy Moore’s accusers. Of course black women voted 98–2 for Doug Jones, the Democrat candidate who successfully prosecuted the men who murdered four young girls in Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963.
Moore spent much of his late candidacy emphasizing his anti-abortion stance. That message rang hollow to those who know history. When white Christian slavers used rape to breed slave girls and women like livestock, black female slaves used abortion as a form of opposition to involuntary motherhood and life-threatening over-breeding. Slave women exercised autonomy over their bodies when possible using birth control and abortion techniques to deprive their owners from future labor and profits resulting from their child-bearing. In June 2011, Roy Moore stated his opposition to all constitutional amendments after the 10th, which include the 13th amendment that ended slavery and legally forced breeding of black women in America. When a white Christian man who thinks America was great during slavery says he opposes abortion, black Southerners know what he’s saying. They also know when Doug Jones maintained his support for the right to choose abortion, it was not expressing a will to kill babies but to support the rights girls and women to self-determination and autonomy.
Moore’s evangelical supporters have perfected the art of posturing in a way that convinces the outside world they cherish the sanctity of life in the womb. Those who have left the white evangelical fold know better. White evangelical opposition to abortion rests firmly on the belief established during chattel slavery that girls and women should be forced by state policy to sustain unplanned and unwanted pregnancies against their will. The white evangelical Christian world view asserts that pregnancy is always a blessing and a gift from God because children serve a purpose. Evangelical children are responsible for advancing the religion through proselytizing and breeding future generations. Girls and women should have no choice but to remain pregnant, no matter the circumstances of conception, the symptoms of pregnancy, or the risks of childbirth. White Christian evangelicals withhold support for funding state-of-the art medical facilities for pregnant women, often leaving them scared and alone when faced with pregnancy and post-partum complications. They want to overturn the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). They express more sympathy for a Christian baker forced to bake a cake for a gay couple than for a post-partum mother suffering from suicidal ideation.
Roy Moore attends a Southern Baptist Church and his pastor Thomas Brown said during the Senate campaign he knows Moore as “a man of integrity, honor and character” believed Moore’s denials of sexual impropriety.
We know for certain Roy Moore ran as a Christian. Real white evangelical Christians who really attend church, Bible study, and potluck suppers voted for him by a wide margin. They did not vote for Moore in spite of their faith, but primarily because of it. As such, former evangelicals are intensifying their calls to empty the pews. As former evangelical Amy Courts wrote this morning
I came from evangelicalism. I used to believe that Black Women were welfare queens, and Native Americans were all drunks, and Muslims were terrorists, and single moms were sluts, and LGBTQIA people were abominable to their Maker.
And I CHANGED.
I listened to the marginalized people I’d demonized, heard them share their experiences, felt burned and pricked and stung when they named the ways that I’d failed the Gospel of Jesus in relation to them…
And I CHANGED!!
So I had hope others could too. I had hope that *evangelicalism* could be rescued to reflect the Gospel more truly and fully.
But twice now — in the 2016 presidential election, and today in the AL special election — evangelicals have come out in whopping 80% droves for blatantly racist, white supremacist, misogynistic, bigoted, sexual predators who openly and flamboyantly hate those Jesus most loves.
So to evangelicalism I will say for the very last time: SCREW YOU every way from Sunday and twice on Wednesday. May your vestiges burn, may your pillars crumble in dust. You mock God. And God will not be mocked.
And to all the evangelicals out there still trying to rescue evangelicalism from the brood of vipers?
Give it up. Give it up. Give it up.
#EmptyThePews and join us in the streets where we’re marching for Jesus and those Jesus loves.
Americans have faced crossroads before. We have never advanced as a people without facing and fighting our ugliest, harshest realities. This Christmas season we have an opportunity to re-imagine Mary as a student studying for finals, an athlete training for a championship, an artist creating a fresh take on a tired theme.
American women have had enough of sexual objectification, harassment, abuse, assault, and exploitation. We are ready to claim control over our bodies and provide our daughters with the tools they need to spend their teen and early adult years unburdened by the demands of marriage and motherhood. This year let’s replace Mary’s nativity mangers with desks, weight machines, microscopes, microphones, and easels. Let’s support our girls in developing healthy self-images based on achievement and internal character rather than appearance and external validation. Let’s stop obsessing over virginity and purity and instead support healthy sexual development and experience. And for heaven’s sake, please let’s stop falling for shallow veneers and pietistic signifiers of respectability and start demanding robust ethical conduct on the part of our leaders.
Sarah Woods is a feminist scholar, theologian, chaplain, and previously ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. She holds a BA in Religious Studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara and a Masters of Divinity from Howard University.
