Considering Tamar: A Survivor-Centered Healing Approach for the Christian Church

I was raped by the cousin of someone I called “friend” when I was 23 years old. After living through childhood sexual abuse, this added breach sent me on a long, winding journey of trying to figure out how to be fully and authentically myself when most of the time I felt incredibly “out of my skin.” I didn’t report what happened. The rape advocate I’d been assigned when I went to the hospital never returned my phone calls. After confiding in my friend what her cousin had done, she told me that it was my fault and listed a litany of things I’d done wrong while alone with him. After that, it would take many years before I’d confide in anyone else. It would take me almost two decades to get the support I needed to truly come to terms with that traumatic experience.

Even though I was a person of faith and a regular church attendee, it never occurred to me to go to my church about the assault. Maybe it was because I felt an overwhelming amount of shame about what happened. Better said, I was scared out of my mind. In hindsight, I know that somewhere in my mind, I didn’t view the church as a safe place to bring this particular kind of pain. I’d seen friends deal with church mothers who asked them, “What did you expect wearing what you did?” I’d heard deacons and pastors elude to those ridiculously myopic questions of “why did you wait so long?” or “why didn’t you fight back?”

Not to mention the numerous inappropriate touches and words that many women I knew, including myself, had experienced at the hands of men (and women) in the church. No, the Christian church—the Western evangelical variety, in particular—was definitely not on my list of places to seek refuge from the weight of my trauma despite the fact that, at its core, that’s exactly what the church should be. The Christian church has a responsibility to support survivors, even more so than other institutions, because of the mandate of care and demonstration of accountability that Jesus asserts to His disciples both 2,000 years ago and today.

We must do better.

The story of how people of faith respond to women who have been sexually assaulted is as old as the biblical text itself. Tamar, a daughter of King David, was raped by her brother Amnon (see 2 Samuel 13). Her violator was not a stranger, and the violation did not occur behind some random, olive tree in the Middle East. Worse, what’s demonstrated in this rarely preached or taught text is the same kind of responses that we see even today in our churches when a person speaks out about their assault. Silencing. Tamar’s loss of agency. Sympathy for the perpetrator. And what I often call emotional injustice—no reconciliation of the heart for the survivor because of all the impediments to their healing put in place by those who were supposed to love and serve her.

So how does the church make this right? How do we do better at holding space for the Tamars in and out of our congregations? Here are a few steps Christian churches can take to walk alongside survivors on their healing journey:

Space to give it air.

Churches must create a culture and community that allows survivors to feel safe to share their stories. Make available a myriad of pathways to healing for those who need it. If we truly believe that “death and life is in the power of the tongue (Proverbs 18:21)” and “we overcome by the blood of the Lamb AND the word of our testimony (Revelation 12:11, emphasis mine)” then we must equally believe that we should help restore life in survivors by allowing them the space for sharing. Giving our stories air diffuses the power of the trauma in our hearts. It breaks the chains of the traumatic memory; chains that can hold our bodies, minds, and destinies hostage. Churches claim to want freedom for their members, so the church should be a vessel for that to happen.

“Giving it air” also means choosing to not be silent in the face of sexual harassment and assault. There are numerous scriptures that support the church’s role in standing up for those who have been wronged (see Micah 6:8, Psalm 82:3, Luke 11:42, Isaiah 1:17) and yet, many times women and men who come forward about their violations are told to keep quiet. Or, they are ostracized because they broke the code of silence that already existed. This has got to end.

It’s an interesting paradox that the church has everything to say about a woman’s sexuality in terms of with whom and when she should have sex—according to specific interpretations of scripture—and yet is silent when forced to confront the violation of that same sexuality. That in and of itself can be a kind of violence. Alone, the defense of the bible as a guide for sexual ethics is problematic at best. The fact that those alleged sexual ethics do not always translate into care for those who are sexually traumatized is beyond devastating. Author, storyteller, and artistic theologian, Alexus Rhone wrote about this contradiction in an essay found in the anthology, Sex and the Church Girl,

“I do not vote for the Bible as a guide for a sexual ethic that transcends time and place. In fact, I believe biblical narratives often check the ‘it’s complicated’ box. The Bible, however, does offer assurance of God’s concern for abusive, unchecked power and rampant injustice. To that end, the scriptures are clearer: God’s not playing with us. For many women of faith who feel the weight of powerlessness sustained by their silence, the scriptures remind us we’re endowed with an innate ability to be tactical.”

The church must eschew silence in favor of helping victims of sexual violence build a strategy for survival.

Facilitate a strategy for healing survivors

So what does “helping build a survival strategy” look like? Tangibly it means opening the pulpit to the discussion and denouncing of sexual assault. Since leadership in many traditional Christian churches is still incredibly centralized, there has to be a clear message of zero tolerance for sexual violence of any kind delivered from pastors and ministers. There is no gray here. There is no “maybe she could have…” or “let’s wait for all the facts…” or “maybe he didn’t know…” We can certainly build a pathway for true repentance and reconciliation for a person who engages in this kind of violence—as the church, we must—but the first step on that path must be accountability and consequence.

The church should also facilitate the formation of support groups led by trained therapists to help survivors navigate the aftermath of their traumatic event—no matter if that aftermath is two days or thirty years later. While I would never have willingly wanted to be a part of a community of sexual assault survivors, I’m clear that having a network and home base of people who have walked through similar experiences has helped facilitate my own healing journey.

Build it into the teaching

Finally, I would encourage churches to consider the development of biblically-centered curriculum that helps everyone in the congregation to wrestle and make sense of biblical texts like Tamar’s that reference sexual assault but also outlines the ways in which the community can support those who have experienced this kind of trauma. Part of that curriculum must include extensive work with young boys around the nature of consent. So much of the nuance and complexities injected into public discourse around sexual assault and violence boil down to a clear misunderstanding of what constitutes consent in a relationship. Sure, the church can continue to preach against pre-marital sex and fornication, if that’s part of the doctrine a particular congregation prescribes to. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t equally invest in teaching what meaningful sexual relationships should look like no matter the context. Believe it or not, those two things are not mutually exclusive; they can live side by side.

One of the immediate benefits of offering safe space for survivors, especially women-identified survivors, to give their stories air and heal from their trauma is that it frees us to not have to internalize misogyny in order to exist in a space that is supposed to offer spiritual grounding. When I was raped, it wasn’t a man who discredited me, it was a woman. There are stories of young girls who go to women in the church about something that made them uncomfortable, only to be chastised and shamed by that woman. Part of this has to do with women who have bought into the narrative of their insignificance and who feel they have to protect the pastor, church, or perpetrator in question. Part of the pervasiveness of rape culture is the fact that there are often unhealed women, sometimes even survivors themselves, who co-sign sexual violence by being the ones who facilitate the silencing of other women. This is entirely too common in the Christian church. Women who have resigned that “boys will be boys” are, yes, complicit in the perpetuating of sexual trauma, but usually have only resorted to this as a form of survival because of their own insecurities within Church culture. When Church leaders shift that culture by allowing survivors to share, holding perpetrators accountable, and putting supports in place, this kind of internalized behavior becomes less and less prevalent. As the Church invests in teaching young boys the nuances of consent and the integrity of being responsible for their actions, we must also teach women and girls to believe other women and girls. To not weaponize each other’s pain in order to survive ourselves.

I have to believe that change is on the horizon for the Christian church. I have to believe that some of the exposure and upheaval we see in leadership across multiple denominations and sects is because of organizations and movements like ‘me too.’ that are shifting the conversation and creating a safe space for survivors to tell their stories and get the healing they need. Aaron Earls writes in a study conducted by factsandtrends.net that, of pastors who had heard of #MeToo, many said that “it has brought changes to their church. Almost 6 in 10 (58%) say their congregation is more aware of how common domestic and sexual violence is. Sixty-two percent say their congregation now has more empathy toward those experiencing domestic and sexual violence.” In that same article, writer, speaker, and survivor, Trillia Newbell says,

“Christian organizations can no longer ignore the issue. They are being forced to make decisions and to implement change to start thinking through this topic and how it relates to the church.”

There is no other option. The church must shift its approach if we truly desire to uphold the central tenets of our faith: To love God (the God who tells us to “maintain love and justice” – Hosea 12:6) and to love our neighbors as ourselves (inclusive of Tamar and all who has walked a similar path).