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.
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.
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?