I’m often surprised what sexist pastors will say in public comments on social media.
This week I’ve been posting quite a bit on Facebook about the story I shared in Monday’s post where the Navigators’ material justified marital rape.
We’ve had multiple posts and conversations on social media about marital rape and how this isn’t okay.
As is often the case, there has been a deluge of men disagreeing with me. I would think that 50% of them are bots, and when they look like new accounts with few friends, I often block them outright. But sometimes it’s clear they’re not bots, and this week I identified two pastors (along with others). And I decided that, if a pastor were to defend or deflect marital rape, then their congregations need to be warned.
I did so on social media, but that often doesn’t affect search engines, and so I’d like to write a post here including the churches so that it’s for posterity.
For context, this was the story that they were reacting to:
Pastor Wayne Neal from Oakman Baptist Church in Georgia defended marital rape
The address of the church is 2706 US Highway 411 NE, Oakman, GA, United States, 30734.
I took a screenshot of his comment and put it up on social media.
This is an interesting comment because it’s not a straightforward denial of marital rape the way the one I’m going to share in a minute is. There seem to be so many things going on in the comment.
First, he seems incapable of judging the marital rape issue as anything other than a gender dynamic. He seems sure that if it were the other way around, we’d still be on the side of the woman. I found this bizarre and commented as such; so did the majority of the commenters on the post. The fact that he doesn’t understand that we support justice and true intimacy and don’t see life as simply a power struggle of what gender will win out is so strange.
As someone commented, it’s like he’s so used to everything being about men keeping women down, that he can’t picture that women wouldn’t want to just keep men down in the situation were reversed. We actually want true intimacy and justice.
Here’s how Amber described it:
Well for starters, Wayne, *if* marital rape was about withholding sex (it’s not. Rape is about power and control, not sex.) But IF it were, takeaway number one is that the wife statistically STILL would not resort to rape as a remedy (that world is beyond predominantly male). And takeaway number two is that IF she did (and that’s a mighty big if), the vast majority of women in general but especially the women who follow Sheila’s work would absolutely, unequivocally, and without prejudice condemn her actions and support her victim.
That’s the difference between men like Wayne and women like us. He assumes we would think about female rapists the way he thinks about male rapists (2 sides to the story, maybe she was asking for it, maybe she should have just given him some, and other nonsense I’m sure). But in reality we have the integrity to call rape what it is: an evil sin and a violent crime, no matter who perpetrates it against whom, regardless of the genitalia possessed by either party, in every situation, no exceptions.
Not quite the gotcha moment Wayne thought he had there….he just outted himself.
And here’s a comment by someone who goes by the moniker Jus Tice:
I’ll hand it to him. He’s adept at packaging a lot into a few sentences:
DARVO (Reverse Victim and Offender): Recasts the abusive party demanding sex as a neglected victim, while framing the actual victim enforcing a boundary as a demanding oppressor.
Pathologizing Autonomy: Treats a normal “no” as a psychological defect (“trauma”) rather than a standard right, framing healthy boundaries as a problem to be fixed. No can mean: I’m tired. I’d rather finish this book. I’m texting with a friend. I’m not feeling well. Or simply just not in the mood.
False Equivalence: Logically conflates an act of physical violation (forcing sex) with an act of bodily self-determination (declining sex) as if they are the same thing.
Causal Reductionism: Strips away legal, physical, and historical power imbalances, reducing the trauma of sexual assault to a petty dispute over marriage standards.
Tu Quoque (Whataboutism): Diverts attention away from the severe reality of marital rape by inventing a fictional, gender-reversed grievance to evade the topic.
Coercive Normalization: Presumes 100% sexual availability is the baseline requirement, forcing the person saying “no” to medically or psychologically justify their boundary.
Subject-to-Object Shift: Erases a person’s daily human agency and conscious choices, reducing them to an object that is either functioning (compliant) or broken (traumatized).
Rape Apologism: Uses soft euphemisms like “twisting an arm for sex” to minimize physical assault, while framing sexual access as a transactional reward for working hard.
And again–this is a pastor who has done this.
Now let’s move to Exhibit B:
Pastor Shawn Holderfield from The Father’s House in Norton, Ohio denies marital rape exists
This one is particularly bad.
He literally said that a man violently forcing his wife to have sex is not rape, because consent is permanent. And he’s a pastor.
When I shared this on Threads, someone found this other comment he had made defending Robert Morris, the disgraced megachurch pastor who was jailed for sexually abusing a 12-year-old decades ago. Here, Shawn argues that he shouldn’t have been prosecuted because it was a different time, and we didn’t see minors as children back then:
People have contacted the church since, and the senior pastor says he is in conversation with Shawn
The senior pastor says that this in no way reflects how The Father’s House ministers. But I have questions:
- The senior pastor has social media posts calling Shawn an amazing pastor and a great example of humility. How did he not know?
- Pastors tend to counsel couples. How would the senior pastor not know that Shawn was such a misogynist?
- Does the senior pastor think that a conversation will change Shawn’s mind?
Quite frankly, someone who believes and posts like this is irredeemable as a pastor. He has lost the right to teach others. Pastors have to first and foremost shepherd, not first and foremost preach. They have to be safe for the flock. This man is so demonstrably unsafe that he has to be kept far away from any place he can do harm.
Even if you have a conversation with him and say, “hey, you can’t say stuff like this,” and he says, “Okay, I won’t,” what does that solve?
This man believes that marital rape doesn’t exist, and that pedophilia isn’t actually a big deal; it’s only a big deal today because our culture has changed.
This man isn’t fit for leadership ever. He isn’t safe for women, and his views will enable entitled men to be predators.
He must be removed immediately, and the fact that he was even on staff with these views means that the other pastors are also suspect.
We need greater accountability for people’s social media comments
So many people treat social media like a place where they can say the most hateful and outrageous things because they enjoy stirring things up, and it makes them feel powerful.
But it isn’t okay.
My dream is that we work towards a non-anonymous internet (with protections and the ability to be private) so that we get rid of bots, and so that people have to put a face to what they are saying. I think much of the toxicity would go away, but also people would be warned and held accountable.
So when I see pastors saying horrible things, I will raise the alarm. I will leave Google reviews, with screenshots. I will leave comments in local Facebook groups. I will post about it.
Because people need to be warned. And I hope now, when people search for The Father’s House in Norton, Ohio, or Oakman Baptist Church in Georgia, this blog post comes up and they will be warned.
What do you think we should do with pastors who make comments like this? Is it automatically disqualifying? How can we warn others? Let’s talk in the comments!
My brain hurts from the logical conundrum here.
If the biblical injunction about your body is no longer entirely your own is true then you can not possibly have permanent de facto consent because you are supposed to go well my body isn’t just mine if she or he says no I have to respect that because I can not unilaterally say I want this if she or he does not.
That injunction exists as a way to say hey think about more than just gratifying yourself. It’s the application of the Golden Rule to being married.
Written to men who in the culture of Rome could legally say my wife is my property.
Well can property say no? Thus injunction says the wife can say no. Therefore the premise is wrong about viewing her as property.
This is very exciting to have permanent consent in marriage!!!
What woman wouldn’t be thrilled, especially if she is in the 63 or so percent of women who cannot orgasm by PIV because of anatomical geometry? Because since consent is permanent, that means that every such woman, and let’s just go ahead and expand that to ALL women, can demand cunnilingus at any time, and the husband must do it, whether he wants to or not. Because he consented at the altar.
Woo-hoo!!!! Cunnilingus on demand!!!
This is actually a great example of why I say that the permanent consent thing makes my brain hurt because logically it flows that a woman could make that demand if consent is this permanent irrevocable de facto status.
I really hate it when preachers try to practice law. They’re never good at it and always make the situation worse.
Shawn is referring to the common law concept that there is an implied (implied is very important here) contract between married persons that they will do certain things for their spouse. Sex and support are the two that come up most often. The contract being implied you can’t go to court to enforce it. A judge can’t order someone to have sex or go to work. It can be used to bolster a divorce case but the burden is on the accuser to show a consistent long term pattern of denial of sex or refusal to work. Even if those can be proven the advantage to the case is slight at best.
I’m not arguing for or against it. Just explaining the legalities.
But yeah the implication of oh yeah married people have sex is not the same as saying oh by the way every act is now de facto consensual.
That goes to horrifying places logically.
Historically the implication has only included PIV sex.
It’s not an exact equivalent, but saying that a marriage vow means that no further consent is ever needed for sex is like saying that when you made the marriage vow, “I all my worldly goods thee endow,” it follows that either spouse can go to the joint checking account and take out however much she wants, for whatever purpose, whenever he wants, without consulting the other.
Since it’s a joint checking account, it would be much more difficult, maybe impossible, to accuse that spouse of theft in a legal sense, compared with taking money out of a stranger’s account. However, from a moral point of view, it’s much worse in a different sense- this money belongs to BOTH of you, and obviously there will be differences of opinion about how it should be used, but part of the intimacy and partnership of marriage is that you work out how to decide TOGETHER. For one person to take advantage of his or her spouse for short-sighted selfish gain is reprehensible, and trust is quickly broken. If you can’t trust your spouse not to clean out the joint account, you’re going to have separate accounts pretty quickly, and any financial intimacy and trust will be replaced with guardedness.
The awful thing is that some people (often men) DO take money from the joint account whenever they want, and they see no problem in it whatsoever. “Now we are married, there is no more my money or your money. It’s all our money now”. And in the small letters: Practically spoken, since I’m the head of the house, your money means our money, but our money means MY money.
I see your valiant downvote there. I think the generator underlying all this is the social-medium. Destin Sandlin at Smartereveryday often talks about the “PD control loop” in systems theory, and how a system needs negative-feedback otherwise it goes “chaotic”, which means that any system without meaningful feedback creates extremes, is volatile, explodes and collapses, because the necessary feedback that would moderate the system isn’t there to do to fulfill it’s function.
What technology companies have done, is built a control system with a narrow purpose, maximize attention, power, and only ever facilitate moderation at the point .. chaos could threatens the ad revenue stream.
The most generous interpretation I can think of is that, people aren’t just monsters the day they finally show up on your post to stay something genuinely hideous and deformed in a digital commons. They’ve been formed and grown that way, starting years ago when the first thing they posted or said that would have raised a concern didn’t immediately result in the negative feedback that would have provided that nudge toward a deeper formation.
Think about that downvote.. when did Facebook/Meta first even allow that feature, and does it send these posters a real notification or response that causes the poster any discomfort, or is it just a signal Meta is free to bury into it’s multi-billion dollar machine to maximize profit on our sacred attention.
I’ll keep reporting and downvoting, and like the jews crying under the oppression of our modern Pharaohs… hoping for the day God will hear and answer that plea for deliverance of this very unique and strange oppression … but until we have a digital medium that respects human nature, I think we’ll continue to struggle with the epistemic formation that happens downstream of the medium designed, not for our wellbeing, but for the extraction of our attention.
This is so true, Matthew. The algorithms thrive on chaos and on extremes and on people being abusive. Because it gets attention and keeps us on their platforms. So there is zero incentive to create negative feedback or accountability because they WANT the abusers to say crazy things.
As a lawyer, I can see that he knows nothing about the law.
Section 2907.02(A)(3) of the Ohio Revised Code in 1980 made it illegal to have sex with someone under 13, and Ohio eliminated marriage as a defense to rape in 1996. It’s also not unusual for places to pass new laws, it’s not some devious feminist plot to change “precedent”. The bigger question is why he decided to confidently lie about this.
It really is wild.
And they wonder why women are more wary of getting married. It’s stuff like this that has always made me question whether I could ever even attempt a relationship, never mind marriage. I haven’t heard it from my church, but I know that there is always a risk of running into this mentality. It’s the Christian equivalent of “If she doesn’t give sex by the 3rd date, I’m out”. I know enough about myself to know that I could never tolerate “Lie back and serve your husband”.
On a slightly unrelated note, I hope we *don’t* get non-anonymous internet, Sheila. I know the purpose, and I want the trolls gone as well. Anonymity definitely brings out cruelty. But I *enjoy* being anonymous when I actually post things. With my taste in hobbies and mentality, I get mistaken for male a lot. An advantage when you hang around still male dominated hobbies like me. Plus, you don’t have all of your extended family looking at your hobbies with a magnifying glass. My lived example is being a fantasy and video game lover in a family where you’re lucky if someone reads fiction at all. I’ve even been told before to not mention that one of my favorite holidays besides Easter is Halloween! Never mind that I’m not a horror fan, and prefer eerie over gore. Anonymity might bring out the trolls, but the shield can work both ways, you know?
Yes, there are a lot of downsides to a non-anonymous internet–chiefly political ones and those fighting for political change under oppressive governments, or whistleblowers anywhere too. Plus just the fun side that you’re talking about!
But I do think abuse would go way down if it wasn’t anonymous. It’s a big tradeoff and I don’t know what the right answer is, but what we’re doing now isn’t working!
Yeah, I definitely agree that our internet system is very broken on multiple levels. Plus, maybe I just don’t have enough faith in people to think that removing anonymity would change much.😅
Hey Sheila! You might find this essay interesting:
https://simone.org/advertising/
Here, Simone argues that making advertising illegal would largely solve a lot of the internet’s problems. Idk how one would make it feasible or enforce this well, but it’s interesting to think about🤔
I am personally very deeply against a non-anonymous internet! Heck, I even use a pseudonym here 🤭 I don’t think I could ever have deconstructed if my family and church knew what I was doing online—the risk of intetacting with “the world” would have been far too great. *Especially* in childhood when the consequences were physical ones, but I wouldn’t have dared disobey or even question anything back then so that’s beside the point for me~
And what a shame that would have been if I had never deconstructed! My nearest and dearest friends are all the very people the church told me to fear and shun. So for people in unsafe communities, anonymity is a true lifeline.
And indeed, the fun side is important too! I think it’d raise a bit more than an eyebrow if my extended family knew about all my hobbies!
And agreeing with Marina, the same is true in reverse. There’s plenty of creeps in the hobbies we love, and I don’t think stripping them of their anonymity would stop them—but going by a gender neutral moniker in those spaces does protect me!
I’m appalled by these so-called pastors. Anyone who believes it’s ok to be unkind when it comes to demanding s@x isn’t following the teachings of Jesus. Full Stop.
It blows my mind that there are people who think that the ‘authority’ that wives have over their husbands’ bodies (and vice versa) doesn’t include the authority to say no to sex! I’ll admit I haven’t dived into the Greek of that passage. But assuming the English translations are vaguely accurate, how could that word have any meaning at all in that context if it doesn’t include the ability to say ‘not tonight’?
I know! Especially since he was writing to counteract the idea that a wife had no autonomy and a husband basically owned her.
I don’t know about American, but in 1980s UK, a 12-year-old would most definitely have been viewed as a child, sex with said child would most definitely have been viewed as abusive and no decent church would allow him anywhere near their pulpit, ever again. And the same would go for any ‘pastor’ who supported people who abused children.
‘Pastor’ Holderfield’s claim that viewing 12-year-olds as children is ‘infantilizing’ them and that the 12-year-old should share the guilt of having a sexual relationship with an adult shows that he is not a safe person to be anywhere near children or indeed anyone vulnerable. I hope any parents attending his church take note and remove themselves and their kids from harms way immediately.
I was 12 in the US in the 1980s. I was 100% considered a child and sex with me would have been perverted. Sometimes young people (I’m assuming he’s under 40) think that anything before they were born might as well be the dark ages. I must have ridden a dinosaur to school. It’s a flat out stupid thing to say, even if it’s not criminal and horrific.
Those two pastors you called out are not at all fit for ministry and deemed unsafe. Good thing for calling them out.
I have heard Christian men say exactly what Shawn said about marital sex. I almost got involved with a man who said the same thing Shawn said. I should have run for the hills the second he said it but it would be several months before I came to my senses, then I stood my ground and moved on.
I went on Amazon to see what kind of reviews I could find for those Navigators books and was surprised to see that there were only good reviews on there.
I assume said “only good reviews” were all in fluent Christianese.
Yes, I saw tons of good reviews for those books. It’s like people didn’t even notice anything wrong.
Brava! Thank you so much for this post.
For the sake of everyone in the flock, and so that the gospel is not brought into disrepute, leaders MUST be publicly outed if they teach and do things that harm people.
“Do not entertain an accusation against an elder unless it is brought by two or three witnesses. But those elders who are sinning you are to reprove before everyone, so that the others [i.e. the other elders] may take warning.” – 1 Timothy 5:19-20
The last official church I left was one where the man who calls himself the pastor had aspirations to build something like Ellerslie (Eric and Leslie Ludy’s campus in Colorado). Red Flag #1.
He also thought nothing of rebuking people from the pulpit. He stopped short of actually naming them, but his descriptions were so obvious that it didn’t matter. Red Flag #2.
Also, one of my friends had asked him for counsel about an issue she had with someone, only to find that he went and told that someone what she had said to him in confidence. Um. Forget the red flags. We’re now in ‘how to flunk Pastoring 101 on the very first test’ territory.
I found out after I Ieft that he’d also told another friend of mine who had divorced her husband for IPV that ‘separation is bad, but divorce is worse’. What the actual?!
I am never going back to a corporate church model, where congregants put themselves ‘under’ a leader, ever again. There’s WAY too much risk of bad fruit associated with it. It’s no wonder that Jesus expressly forbade church hierarchies: power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
That’s so awful that you church acted that way! Yuck!
“As someone commented, it’s like he’s so used to everything being about men keeping women down, that he can’t picture that women wouldn’t want to just keep men down in the situation were reversed.”
The pastor under scrutiny shows the attitude of someone who views everything through the lens of Power Struggle. Top or Bottom, Dom or Sub, Control or Be Controlled, Penetrate or Be Penetrated, My Boot Stamping on Your Face or Your Boot (stiletto heel, actually) Stamping on Mine, no other states possible.
In his first best-seller “The Strong Willed Child”, James Dobson showed a similar attitude and view lens.
Shawn Holderfield did a Mother’s Day Sermon On may 11, 2025 that was live streamed on You Tube-In addition to the usual bashing of feminists he said some stuff about
“Honor Your Father and Your Mother By Pastor Shawn Holderfield
Streamed live on May 11, 2025
Honor Your Father and Your Mother By Pastor Shawn Holderfield
https://www.youtube.com/live/LJ7Kme5cG2E?si=0K-5LSaGoJMR4YSY
44:05
……….. Eve, interestingly enough, Eve was not cursed. He doesn’t mention anything. He
44:12
doesn’t use the word curse as he began to say what what was going to befall Eve. But he it was in a sense a punishment. Now, you could say, well,
44:21
there what’s the difference between a curse and a punishment? I can’t tell you exactly the nature of that, but I suspect that there’s a bit of a difference. A curse
44:29
is something heavier. He didn’t curse Eve, but he did say this to her. She was punished. And it was with reg pain
44:37
regarding her motherhood and subjection regarding her husband. He said, “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth.” What does that cover? Co
44:46
covers her motherhood. And he said, “You you will your desire will be to your husband and he will rule over you in a
44:54
heavier way than what was made to be.” She wasn’t made to be ruled over in a in a heavy way, but she was now placed in
45:02
subjection to Adam in a heavier way…….”
He doesn’t say anything that other complementarian pastors have said, but in retrospect, that last line is very creepy. So is Eve’s subjection to Adam in a “heavier way” supposed to be violent God approved marital rape? So are all women placed under a “heavier way of subjection” to their husbands, and this becomes a blanket statement that all sex is consensual, even marital rape, just because she said “I Do”? It gives me the creeps just to hear this sermon. And of course Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother is the title-The father is placed first in a mother’s day sermon even though Leviticus 19:3 reverses the order, but hey let’s honor fathers before mothers by using the othe verse!!! But I digress. The fact that he says women have a “heavier burden of subjection” in marriage after the fall than before the fall tells me he thinks this stuff is all God ordained. Oh, he stops short by saying the woman isn’t cursed like the man, but she stills gets a punishment as a “heavier burden of subjection”. Never mind that Eve wasn’t in subjection to the man before the fall, and after the fall, the “heavier burden” is a fall out because of sinful environment that Adam and Eve found themselves in. This guy thinks the “heavier burden in subjection” is God ordained that applies to the marital bed as well is what I take from this!
Oh wow! So he thinks we’re supposed to be continuing the punishment and not letting up on women? That’s wild! And, yes, I’d imagine he does think this extends to marital rape. What gets me is that the church acted really surprised when they removed him yesterday–and I’m very glad they removed him. But why, given what he’s said in the past, was all of this so surprising?
“Oh wow! So he thinks we’re supposed to be continuing the punishment and not letting up on women? That’s wild!”
Not when God wears a Marvel Punisher Skull T-shirt…
“44:29
is something heavier. He didn’t curse Eve, but he did say this to her. She was punished. And it was with reg pain”
Which is why until Queen Victoria set the example and changed things, anesthesia and painkillers were forbidden for women in labor:
“In PAIN Shalt Thou Bring Forth Children.”
Which a few years ago some (male) preacher went on record with “because her screams of agony are there to remind us all what Totally Depraved SINNERS we are”.
Hmm, my comment didn’t show up.
It did after all. LOL
It did after all. LOL
It appears that The Father’s House in Ohio has removed Shawn Holderfield permanently from ministry there based on the influx of comments and concerns about his posts.
Shawn has it totally backward. When you get married, you permanently give up control over your own sex life… because now any sexual desire you may have is contingent on consent by your spouse. But you give up none of your bodily integrity, your right to say no.
The problem is that purity culture depicted marriage as the moment when you finally throw away all the restraints on your sex life and get to experience wild endless orgies limited only by your imagination. We’ve forgotten that marriage is actually a decision to accept a new and weighty restraint. To hand someone else the keys to your sex life. Even if it turns out that sex isn’t possible in marriage at all, or requires years of healing before it becomes possible.
“The problem is that purity culture depicted marriage as the moment when you finally throw away all the restraints on your sex life and get to experience wild endless orgies limited only by your imagination.”
It is for the BOYZ. (And they’ve been building up quite a checklist – “I don’t know. I can imagine a lot.”)
For the GURLZ it’s “you stand where he tells you to stand, you do what he tells you to do – Your Body, His Choice”.
(That’s the thing. Purity Culture is actually TWO Purity Cultures, depending on what you got between your legs.)
Exactly! Well said. Also marriage is not a reward for good behaviour, but a covenant relationship.
I have long commented about Purity Culture’s message to boys, i.e. “marriage is your reward for saving yourself for marriage” and what it can lead to.
The two different Purity Cultures (mentioned in my comment above) are truly a synergistic Match Made in Hell.
This is the sad reality of the “modern church” – it’s all about the #’s and the money and the bigger the machine gets the more easily predators can hide in said machine. And sadly, the blind sheep follow along because it’s easier to take everything that’s said from the pulpit instead of searching the Scriptures independently and seeking wisdom, discernment, and God’s leading. They prefer to be led by a charismatic narcissistic gaslighter (dare I say sociopath?) instead of working out their own salvation with fear and trembling. We truly are living the last days.