Last Sunday, a disturbing video went viral of a teen girl apologizing for being pregnant in front of her church.
It was an Apostolic church in Virginia. After her confession. The congregation applauded, but then the pastor got up and chastised them, saying that no one was allowed to throw her a baby shower or attend any baby shower. The girl’s mother was allowed to care for the grandchild once the child was here, but no one would be celebrating sin, and the mother, sister, or anybody else couldn’t give her daughter a baby shower.
I’m not going to share the video because it just shames the girl, and I want to talk about the bigger issue at play here, which isn’t just about her, but about the many, many girls and women who have been forced to do the same thing (and many have been speaking out on social media this week).
Lots of people have been talking about this horrible situation, including:
This wasn’t an Immaculate conception.
There was a guy involved too, but no one seems to be chastising him. He gets off scot free.
Jesus didn’t treat women like this.
He cared for them; he didn’t shame them.
You can’t claim to be pro-life and then make sure that the pregnancy makes the girl suffer.
If you want her to have the baby, then the community has to come alongside and support her in doing so.
But I want to talk about another aspect to this, that I think is even more disturbing.
Evangelical and fundamentalist teen girls are the least likely to recognize date rape.
Are we punishing and shaming girls for being raped?
The answer is undoubtedly yes. No, not every case of a girl being forced to confess to the congregation is rape. But an awful lot of them are, and these congregations, and these girls, all too often miss the signs and don’t even know how to identify consent.
Evangelical, fundamentalist culture spreads rape myths.
As we’ve been trying to show for years, especially in our book She Deserves Better, rape myths are baked into most of our books to teen girls, and in the way we talk in youth groups. Even if those books aren’t selling as well today as they did a decade ago, those messages are now being shared on social media, and those messages informed the people who lead youth groups today.
Just a few examples:
When God Writes Your Love Story conflates the story of a 12-year-old who is raped with the story of a university age woman who has consensual sex, mentioning them in the same page as being in need of healing.
For Young Women Only says that “if you want to stop, it’s safest to not even start.” Imagine you’re a girl who is pressured into sex and whose boyfriend keeps pushing her until he rapes her. Is she going to realize she’s not at fault? Or is she going to say, “Well, I started, so what did I expect?”
(See our analysis of how Shaunti Feldhahn’s survey question justified date rape.)
Every Young Woman’s Battle asks a girl who is date raped (it’s not called that, but in context that’s what it is) “what did you expect” since she went down to the basement with him. It also says that when you dress certain ways, you should expect that boys will treat you that way.
And there are so many more!
Teen girls are also taught that boys can’t stop once you start making out.
When we did our survey of 7000 women about their experiences in church as teens, 68% reported believing “If a girl makes out with a boy, she is responsible for stopping the sexual progression because he won’t be able to.”
(And here are the other questions we asked; look how many are really rape myths!)
We put that question in there because of a statement that Shaunti Feldhahn made in For Young Women Only. She stated, based on a flawed survey question, that 82% of boys felt little ability or little responsibility to stop in a makeout situation, so it was the girl’s job to stop, or not to start.
But let’s be clear–100% of boys have both the ability and the responsibility to stop.
Teaching that boys can’t or won’t stop means that if a girl is raped, she doesn’t think, “he did something to me.” She thinks, “I did something to myself by putting myself in this situation, because he can’t help it.”
And that’s exactly what’s happened.
We showed in She Deserves Better that girls blame themselves when they’re assaulted.
When the church teaches that what you wear can cause a boy to get out of control, then when you’re raped, you can think, “well, I shouldn’t have been wearing that mini-skirt.” (And we have a story of a girl in She Deserves Better who believed just that.)
We talked to so many women in focus groups who didn’t realize until 20 years later, often when they had daughters themselves, that what they thought had been them sinning by having sex before marriage and losing their purity was actually rape.
They said no repeatedly, but their no wasn’t listened to. So they stopped saying no, and they were raped. But they thought it was their fault. They had never been taught what consent actually means.
And then it gets worse.
Because girls are taught that the reason you resist having sex is because you need to save your virginity for your husband and save your purity, then once they are raped, and their purity is gone, they have no reason to say no to sex now. And many women told us they stopped resisting their rapist afterwards, and kept having sex with him, because they didn’t feel like they could say no anymore. Some even married their rapist because they believed they were already married in God’s eyes.
I looked for a quote from She Deserves Better to leave you with, but the entire chapter 8 on consent is so important. It’s just story after story and evidence after evidence that evangelicalism blames girls for their own date rapes, and fails to recognize lack of consent when it’s staring them in the face. Whether it’s desperate letters by 15-year-old girls to Brio magazine describing what sounds like a rape, and Focus on the Family replying that they need to confess and not do it again; whether it’s Steve Arterburn telling girls that Christian boys only want to have sex with you (and basically Christ makes no difference); whether it’s youth pastors asking “what were you wearing?”.
This needs to change.
So let me leave you with the conclusion from that chapter:
From She Deserves Better
In books like For Young Women Only, girls read messages from guys like, “If you want to be able to stop it, it’s safest to not even start.” Vera’s youth pastor says, “What do you expect? You were dating a non-Christian.” Steve Arterburn says that even Christian guys want to use girls for their own pleasure.
Rather than teaching girls a holistic understanding of consent, evangelical teachers have typically framed assault as a natural consequence of girls “letting” boys go too far. It’s like we’re so afraid that our girls will have consensual sex that we scare them into thinking that every boy is going to rape them. And then, when a boy actually does, the implication is that it’s their fault and they should have known better.
Our girls deserve better than this.
Check out She Deserves Better on Amazon. The paperback is still 30% off!
When a teen girl gets pregnant, we simply can’t assume it was consensual.
We must have compassion regardless, because that’s what Jesus would do. We must support her, and not shame her.
But especially, please people, remember that girls raised in this type of environment are the least likely to recognize date rape. They are the most likely to blame themselves.
Ask good questions. Make sure they’re safe. Get them the help they need.
And please, please, stop making girls and women apologize for getting pregnant. That’s abhorrent. It looks nothing like Christ, and we all deserve better.
What do you think? Have you ever seen a woman or girl having to confess to being pregnant? What can we do about this? Let’s talk in the comments!
So, so much truth in this post. My first partner was just like described.
I am out of an abusive marriage and know what coercion and rape look like, and I have still found myself back in the same patterns again.
In the moment, I do what is expected of me. And it doesn’t feel like rape, and I’m not recognizing the coercion. But after the fact, there is still a negative effect.
It isn’t necessarily that there is no attraction or desire. (Quite the opposite, to be honest.) I think this is what is left out of the conversation. The female can desire the experience just as much as the male. But if she is hesitating, saying no, or pulling away, and he continues, it is at a minimum coercion. Her being turned on does not give him permission to override her verbal or physical objection.
This brought me to tears. I work at a pregnancy care centre I’m Edmonton and I just saw the face of all our clients in this sweet girl. All the conversations we have every week with women telling them they are loved by God and thier baby is loved even if it wasn’t planned, she’s single or a teenager…and then this pastor blasphemous actions is counter to everything we stand for. How disgusting.
This is such an important observation. I think much of the guilt and shame that young women experience is that they confuse their own interest in a man, their curiosity about sex, their physical arousal, etc etc as taking away their right to say “no”, “not that,” “not here,” “not now.” It’s as if you had to be 100% opposed to the idea of sex, and have no mixed feelings at all, in order to have the right to say no.
It’s as if you and a friend are considering going into a business partnership. You might be genuinely interested in the project, genuinely consider your friend a good prospective partner, seriously be considering investing. All that does not give your friend the right to pressure or coerce you into signing a contract or writing a check before you feel 100% ready to proceed. Or wait until you’re intoxicated and then pull out the pen and checkbook.
Well said!
That last paragraph… yes.
Even if it was consensual, no one should be treated like that. And the way they took away her autonomy over the raising of her child is awful. What if she’d wanted to give the baby up for adoption, or raise it herself? The fact that her mother let this happen to her own daughter doesn’t bode well for the baby’s well-being.
>> There was a guy involved too, but no one seems to be chastising him. He gets off scot free.
The minute I saw the tagline, I knew this was the case. My guess is they aren’t even MENTIONING the guy. This is like a story I once heard about a school in the midwest. Their Honor society had a HUGE list of punishments for what would happen if a girl member got pregnant. No mention at all of a boy member who gets a girl pregnant.
So the pastor *gives PERMISSION* for the mother to care for the baby after it is born, but they “won’t celebrate the sin?”
WHAT. THE. EFFFFFF!!!!!
Did he expect that they would just let the baby die if he didn’t *give permission* to care for it?
Would the church have prevented them from caring for the baby if he didn’t *give permission* to care for it?
This just makes me want to scream. And I can only imagine what it makes Jesus want to do. Can we flip some tables?
Oh, sorry, I wrote that wrong! He gave permission for the girls’ mother to care for the baby–so the grandmother. I’m sorry. I’ll go correct it now.
Either way, it’s atrocious!
Only the girl’s mother is mentioned. I wonder if she is a single mother who is angry at her daughter for following in her footsteps.
I read in a comment that she was indeed. This is just so sad.
This happened when I was a teenager back in the 80s but I honestly didn’t know it was still happening. I remember feeling so bad for the girl. It disgusted me that I never saw any other person, before or since, have to stand on the platform and confess their sin, but here was my friend (who obviously already had the pregnancy shape) having to “confess” to the church. It still disgusts me that she was forced to do that.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate” – Carl Jung.
That’s what’s happening here, isn’t it? The mother hasn’t addressed everything that went into her becoming a single mother and therefore, is creating the same problems over and over again.
I grew up in evangelical brethern / holiness church. Sexually molested from age 6 to age 10….told on him. He was a family member. Was told never speak of it again, as it would destroy the family, ( I was told if my father found out, he’d kill the man who did it. That is a lot of responsibility to put on a child)
At 10 i was molested by a boy( he was age 15 or 16) from church when I had to stay with his family for a few weeks because my mom was sick.
Got pregnant at 14 to a 21 year old man.
Shamed and blamed. He should have been arrested for statutory rape. Lost, hurting and thinking it’s all my fault. Another child born by 17. At 18, beaten and violently raped, the police and the system reaffirmed it had to be my fault, even though i fought back until he threatened to kill me. I was the one with bruises.
Met the man I married at 19. By this point, I was drinking and smoking pot to cope. It was the night of the one year anniversary of being beaten and raped.
I was intoxicated. He was 5 years older. I woke up to him in my bed and him having sex with me. I never wanted that. I never understood I had a choice or that no was a complete sentence until almost 50. The shame and guilt I carried all my life was bondage. If someone would have heard me as a child, counseled me, helped me understand i had a right to say no and have boundaries. I spent my whole life , up until almost 50 years old, in the bondage and chains of this hellish way the church teaches and handles sex. I have 10 children. I got away from my abuser 5 years ago. I’m in process of a life saving divorce. I am teaching my children, now about boundaries and autonomy. Some of them already have the scars of sexual abuse. We are all in counseling to heal. This is multi generational. My mom, my aunts…stuff happened to them. They grew up Mennonite. Me, some of my children…by the grace of God, it stops here. The church needs to wake up. It needs to hold sexual abusers and all abusers accountable. An abuser should be ashamed and called out, not his victim. The little girl in me, just wanted to be safe, yet there was no safety to be found. Not at church, not at home, not in public, not with family or church family. I was a child. Now I am grown . I will make safe spaces, for me, my children, others who need a safe refuge. I will sit with them, listen, cry, pray with them and tell them Papa God loves them and it is NOT their fault. I will teach boundaries and who they really are in Jesus and how Jesus loves them and sees them and how he taught to raise women up. It must start somewhere, it starts with us. The victims, that became survivors, who go back into the fire to pull others to safety and show them the Lord loves them , regardless of where they have been. All that shame and guilt is a lie from the pit of hell. It has been used to control victims for centuries. Remember Jesus asking about casting that first stone?
We can imagine that woman’s situation and the culture of the time. That guilt and shame …It was never ours to carry and healing is possible!!
TO GOD BE THE GLORY!
Oh, wow, Mja, what a lot to live through! I’m so, so sorry! But how wonderful that you’re breaking these generational chains for your kids. I can just imagine how hard it is. I know it’s a lot of difficult work. But I’m so glad you’re seeing the other side! Guilt and shame must switch sides!
What a turnaround. You go, Mja.
Hugs, but most definitely ONLY if you want ’em.
Wow Mja, you should write a book. What a journey and yet through all that brokenness and insult you sound so strong and like you are ‘taking back the land’! It’s incredibly admirable. Thank you for sharing such an incredibly sad story but with such an encouraging and inspiring outcome. Fight on!
If this congregation was truly pro life, wouldn’t they welcome this child with open arms? Even though it’s less ideal to be born to a single teenage mother? Instead they are making the teenage mother and baby suffer. That’s not about being pro life.
So many thoughts…it boggles the mind. Even assuming that this was a consensual act that she now regrets, what is the purpose of bringing her in front of the ENTIRE congregation and chastising her publicly? What did the pastor think he gained from doing this? I suspect that if we had Matthew 18-ed this, the pastor (or maybe even just her mom) could have seen she was sorry for her actions back at the one or two person interaction stage.
Also what other sin do we do this with? I have never heard of some executive being publicly chastised at his church for embezzlement or cheating on his wife. People who lie and cheat? They are never brought before the entire congregation like that.
Exactly! Sexual sin, especially by young women, is considered the worst of the worst. It boggles the mind, and looks nothing like Christ.
One of the women in my mother and baby groups 15 years ago, when asked about her pregnancy (we were all swaping stories) said that she had about half an hour warning that she was going to be a mother. She had gone to A&E with stomach pains, and came home with a baby. Her church kicked her and her parents out. The conception had been a rape and she didn’t have many pregnancy symptoms so she didn’t realise.
Oh my goodness! How horrifying!
This is heart-breaking. Just when she needs the most support (whether consensual or not, she’s going to have a baby), her whole church PUBLICLY turns their back on her. This is not the church of the Bible. This is a shunning of the most vulnerable. Shameful, what desparate, struggling, lost soul is going to want to come near a Christianity like that? This is not light and salt. It’s judgement and condemnation. God help us.
It truly is awful. And the mother is defending the pastor on social media. I hope one day the mother can have proper compassion for her daughter.
Maybe the daughter lacks appropriate boundaries with men and a healthy sense of self respect because of the way her mother treats her.
It’s a possibility.
Too true!
Controversial take I firmly believe: impregnating someone without their consent **is** a form of rape.
Yep!
Not so controversial: in several U.S. states and countries, removing a condom without the partner’s knowledge (known as “stealthing”) is considered a form of sexual assault.
The crazy raging sexism of only punishing young women this way – cruel and inhumane.
You’re so right, Sheila. If a woman (who isn’t the Virgin Mary and want using IVF) is pregnant, all we know is that PIV happened. We don’t know anything about whether it was wanted, coerced, done at gunpoint, the result of grooming, or if she initiated. There is so much about intent, knowledge, free will, and psychology that goes into whether or not the act was sinful *on her part.*
One of the many reasons to leave judging up to God is that the Lord knows our hearts in ways that our fellow humans cannot.
Perfect response, Jane!
This situation seems like it might be a good candidate for the standalone podcasts you want to do.
Why is it only the female that gets singled out for judgment and condemnation? Why does the male never get called out? These pregnancies are never parthenogenesis! (I think “immaculate conception” refers to Mary’s own conception, not to Jesus’s.)
Ejaculate responsibly, men!
(that’s a great book by the way–Ejaculate Responsibly!)
Thank you for addressing this, Sheila! I appreciate that you connected this story to the fact that girls raised with these toxic teachings are less likely to recognize rape. This is exactly what happened to me.
At 24 years old, I groggily woke up to my boyfriend having his way with me (I may have been drugged). It took me YEARS to recognize this as rape. I was raised with all these faulty beliefs, and I specifically remember my father telling me that boys and girls can’t be friends, boys only want one thing, and they can’t help themselves. It was my responsibility to not tempt them, and it was my responsibility to make sure things didn’t go too far physically. Even after recognizing it was rape, it took me many more years to stop blaming myself (it was your teachings that helped me!)
A few weeks after that incident with my boyfriend, I realized he was abusive and I left him. Ten days after that, I found out I was pregnant. My parents only concern was that my pregnancy made them look and feel like bad parents. There was ZERO concern for my baby, and zero concern for my health and safety. I was forced to sit down in person with each of my siblings and “confess my sin.” Then my father made me move out, saying it was too hard on my mom to see me every day and be reminded of “what I did to her.”
I moved in with a cousin and also tried to work it out with my abusive ex, based on another toxic belief: that children born to single parents are certainly doomed. I spent 6 more months being abused by my ex before I realized my baby was better off with one healthy parent than two in an abusive relationship. Anyway, soon after moving out, my mom called my cousin who I lived with, demanding that she stop helping me because I needed to “learn my lesson.” Looking back, I’m pretty sure there was nothing I could do to satisfy her. She was angry that her 24-year-old daughter (who just got her Master’s Degree) was not a virgin anymore, and she wanted to punish me.
During my pregnancy, I found out that my parents got married because of a pregnancy (that was miscarried), and I know my parents never dealt with their shame over this. While it wasn’t their intent, they passed their shame onto me. Instead of reflecting on how hard it was for them being unmarried and expecting, and deciding to do better for me, they just piled on more shame. What was a tragic situation was made a million times worse because of how they handled it. I bet this has happened to so many Christian families, and it makes Jesus weep.
Oh my goodness! I’m amazed that you got through that. That’s so horrible! I’m so sorry. It certainly does make Jesus weep.
I was thinking that the “pastor” could have been the one to rape her. And where’s the sperm donor? Why are they shaming a teen girl for reproducing? Even if it was consensual, there are many worse sins, like rape!
Final thought (maybe): it’s good to teach young people how babies are made, and good to understand that baby-making activities are best kept to marriage.
But once a woman is actually pregnant, getting too specific about the provenance of the child’s just plain gross.
I experienced this as a married woman. The pregnancy speculation and comments were *so specific* that I was like… you’re making very crass and almost perverted statements about when we did it without protection.
A woman is pregnant. Unless she’s Mary, we don’t need to announce to the whole freaking world how she got that way. Basic etiquette demands that we not get public about deeply private matters.
Aren’t there studies that show that at least 50 percent of PASTORS admit to watching porn?
If I’m remembering the number correctly, then that means the betting is odds-on that this “pastor” is in that cohort. I’m sure he’d LOVE to get up in front of his congregation and have that confession dragged from him.
Then all the rest of the porn users sitting in the pews can stand up and confess too.
What say, fellas?
But pastors who confess such things get a standing ovation.
My (abusive) husband loves to argue with atheists on forums. Especially about how evil abortion is. I finally realised that it’s the sin that he can’t commit, so he can be ever so self-righteous and condescending about it. The other day I finally said to him, “If men would treat their women and children the way the Bible teaches, there would be no abortions.” He rolled his eyes and left the room .
Good for you for speaking up! I hope you are able to find safety and peace. I’m sorry for what you’re going through.
Does anyone know how to reach this family? I want to send this young mother a baby shower gift.
Maybe that seems far fetched as I’m sure they are wanting privacy from the internet craze but I feel like this is exactly what the global church needs to do. You asked what do we do about this, and maybe you meant what do we do about the church shaming girls and ignoring date rape, but what do we do about this girl? We need to show them the love of Christ in ways that this pastor and local church is not.
Things like this happen all the time, someone sets up a go fund me or a baby registry is created for the family and the address for shipping gifts is private.
Given the internet attention, I know there are people close to her that have reached out (and there’s a viral video of another man confronting the pastor). So I hope people have reached out!
It happened in a church that I attended…it was the pastor’s granddaughter who was forced to confess. She was in her early 20’s but was unmarried. I was close to the same age at the time and it was so disturbing to me. I stopped attending church completely not too long after that and I haven’t attended regularly since then (over 20 years ago).
I completely agree with this article. In the past year, I finally realized why I said that I never wanted to be married. I completely forgot that that until I was SA’d, that I wanted to get married. My church upbringing taught me that no man wanted to marry a woman who had had sex. She had no worth. No one explained if there was an exception to the rule. No one ever talked about consent or that our worth was not tied to sex. I believed everything that I was taught. So much destruction in my sexual life followed because of that lie. After years of therapy, a lightbulb finally went off and my memories of wanting to be married came flooding back. The most interesting part about this is that when given the opportunity, I taught young women the healthier version of this and still had blocked out my memory. It would be 15 years later after that retreat that what I taught would sink in and heal the broken girl inside of me.
Oh, wow! I’m so glad you had that insight, but also so sorry for what you’ve gone through. So very sorry!
I grew up in a church that made people stand up in a meeting and confess these sorts of things, under penalty of being disfellowshipped and cast out of the church’s umbrella of protection. Usually (in the case of unwed and pregnant) the next step in “making it right” was a hasty wedding, often with no real celebration – the stereotypical “sad bride in a pink dress” kind of thing. And growing up, I embraced it as I believed (as I had been taught) that this is how the church maintained purity, by standing up to sin.
I wish I would’ve been inquisitive enough back then to ask why sexual sins were the only ones that got brought before the church. I don’t remember anyone in the church where I grew up having to stand up and confess that they’d gotten a speeding ticket, or that they’d failed to pay their property taxes, or that they’d eaten too many desserts at the most recent potluck. The only such confessions recall involved unmarried pregnant couples, plus one extramarital affair. Nothing else needed forgiving from the congregation, I guess.
So true. Why is it that sex is the main sin that matters, and that women bear the brunt of the blame, when the New Testament did nothing of the sort?
Jane King touched on this, but I’ll say the same thing. This church (and others) seems to be bent on making the baby suffer, too. I’ve heard of families who won’t acknowledge babies born out of wedlock, as if they’re sinning just by being born.
Yes, having sex outside of marriage is wrong, but exiling the mother (not the father, of course) and child is just wrong.
Somebody who continually and repeatedly abuses and hurts others should be kicked out, not a teenage girl who made a mistake, and certainly not the child, who is also “tainted” in the eyes of some churches.
It’s also worth bringing up in these discussions that there are more teen mums than dads because the dads are often far older. Consent in such power dynamics is unlikely.
Very good point!