The #MeToo movement did not reveal a problem that lives only in Hollywood or the office. It revealed something already sitting inside congregations. Rev. Dr. Neichelle Guidry, founder of She Preaches, a professional development organization for Black women in ministry, argues that the attitudes that make women less safe in the wider world have moved into the church. Her answer is direct. Name that culture. Preach the biblical stories that expose it. Hold abusers accountable even when they are pastors people love. Then stand publicly with the woman who speaks.
That answer only works if a congregation first agrees the mirror is showing something true.
What did #MeToo actually expose?
Start with how the movement began, because Guidry insists on it. By her account, the phrase began with Tarana Burke, a Black woman activist who noticed about ten years earlier that her community had advocacy and resources for many needs, but not for survivors of sexualized violence. Me Too was her way of connecting Black survivors with one another. It reached a mass audience later, when the actress Alyssa Milano used it after the allegations against Harvey Weinstein and many women followed with their own stories.
Guidry calls that wave powerful. She also names what got lost in it: Burke’s name, and with it the fact that the movement started among Black survivors. She observes that “the work of black women also often gets erased” once that work becomes popular. This is not a footnote to the abuse question. It is the same pattern on a smaller scale. When a woman’s labor or testimony is absorbed into someone else’s story, she loses authorship of her own experience. A church that wants to respond well has to notice who started speaking first, and who was listening when no cameras were.
The second thing the movement exposed is the subject of this piece. Many Christians assume abuse is something happening out there, among people who do not know God. Guidry’s claim is that the church is not outside it at all.
Is “rape culture” a fair description of a church?
The phrase sounds like an accusation that every church hides assaults. Guidry means something more precise, and the precision matters. In her definition, “rape culture is a complex web of attitudes, myth, and behaviors that normalize any kind of violence against women, any kind of second class citizenship against women.” The term describes an environment, not only an act.
Her examples are ordinary. Women’s bodies are policed. Their clothing is policed. In some spaces they cannot say certain things without consequences. None of that is assault, and she does not claim it is. Her claim is causal. Physical violence does not appear from nowhere. “That’s because it’s been preceded by other types of violence, ideological violence in the church, theological violence.” She adds discursive violence, meaning how women are talked about and talked to. Together, those habits make harassment and assault easier to commit and easier to excuse.
Then comes the claim that gives #MeToo its mirror quality. “There is not a church that I have come into contact with” that has escaped this, Guidry says. The world’s rape culture has “in some sense intoxicated the culture inside the four walls.” She lists Black churches, white churches and open and affirming churches together. This is not a charge against one kind of congregation.
The fairest objection is that she is generalizing from her own experience. That is true, and she frames it that way: churches she has encountered. Her statement is testimony from a preacher and scholar who has worked inside many congregations, not a survey result. But notice what the objection cannot do. It cannot show that any church is sealed off from the assumptions of its surrounding culture. Her argument does not need every pew to hide an abuser. It needs only to show that the attitudes which shelter abusers are present, and any congregation can test that against its own habits of speech.
Where did the Black church inherit this, and where did it resist?
Guidry offers a historical account in two stages. First, she argues that women had a powerful presence in the earliest church, and that myths about women as less capable, too emotional or impure hardened once the church was institutionalized after Constantine. This is her reading of the history, and historians of early Christianity weigh the evidence for women’s roles and the timing of later restrictions in different ways. It is best taken as her interpretation, not a settled chronology.
Second, she turns to the historic Black church in the United States, which rose out of slavery and the specific suffering of enslaved Black women. Her assessment is candid: “the black church didn’t necessarily do a great job of differentiating itself in terms of gender.” A church born in resistance to one kind of domination did not always resist another.
She does not let that be the only story. She points to “black women who preached anyways and led anyways and created churches and denominations anyways.” That counterexample carries real weight. The tradition contains both the failure and the resistance to it. Jude 3 Project honors the Black church as a guardian of historic Christian faith and a witness for justice, and calls it, like every tradition, to continual faithfulness to Scripture. Guidry’s critique is that kind of call.
One distinction needs drawing. Guidry links limits on women’s leadership to the myth that women are less worthy. Faithful Christians who love Scripture disagree about women preaching and leading in the church, and this article does not settle that question. A reader can hold either view on ordination and still accept the core of her argument: that blaming women for what was done to them, policing their bodies and treating their testimony as suspect are wrong. Those practices do not depend on any position about who preaches. They depend on whether a congregation believes women bear God’s image as fully as men do.
What does the garden have to do with blame?
A familiar pattern follows sexual misconduct in churches. People ask what the woman wore or how she tempted him, and the man’s responsibility goes unspoken. Many trace that habit back to Eden. Guidry takes the text seriously and offers a reading many readers have never heard.
The command came to Adam before Eve was formed. Genesis 2:17 records God’s words: “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Eve is created afterward, in Genesis 2:21-22. Guidry observes that the narrative never shows Adam passing the instruction on. Then, when confronted, he points elsewhere. Genesis 3:12 reads: “And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.”
Interpreters should be honest about what this reading can carry. In Genesis 3:2-3 Eve repeats a version of the command to the serpent, so she knew something of it, and the text does not say how she learned it. Guidry’s point about Adam failing to convey it is an inference from silence, and other Christian readers will weigh it differently. The second half of her reading stands on firmer ground. Adam’s first recorded words after the fall shift blame onto the woman, and onto God for giving her. That is plainly in the text.
Guidry connects that move to two habits in rape culture. One is provocation, the idea that he did not really know what he was doing. The other is its mirror, blaming the victim. Between them, “there’s always this lapse, there’s this thing right in between where there’s just not responsibility on the part of men for their actions.” Her remedy is to build “exercises and constructs of accountability” in exactly that gap. The phrase matters because it moves accountability from sentiment to structure. A congregation that never asks men to answer for their actions is not more gracious. It simply leaves the next woman exposed.
Should the hardest stories in Scripture be preached?
Judges 19 is the test case. A Levite hands his concubine to a mob, she is abused through the night, and he later cuts her body into pieces and sends them through Israel to demand justice. Guidry presses the question the text forces on him: “Did you not put her out on the doorstep to be raped?” The man calling for a crusade helped cause the crime. That is the same gap she named in the garden, a man demanding accountability from everyone but himself.
She also reads the dismemberment as a picture of what harassment, gender bias and patriarchy do to women. “It leaves women feeling dismembered.” The image works because it names a loss that often has no visible wound. She notes that healing is sometimes described as being re-membered, put back together, something the woman in Judges never received.
Guidry calls Phyllis Trible’s book Texts of Terror foundational, and reports Trible’s argument that the construction of these narratives reflects patriarchal values. That is Trible’s thesis as Guidry summarizes it. Jude 3 Project holds that Scripture is the inspired, authoritative Word of God, fully trustworthy in all it intends to teach, and many Christian interpreters who share that conviction read these stories differently: as honest description of atrocity, not endorsement. Judges frames itself that way. It closes with the verdict of Judges 21:25: “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” Within the story, those who see the body are told in Judges 19:30 to “consider of it, take advice, and speak your minds.”
Both readings land in the same place on the practical question. The stories are in the Bible, and skipping them teaches something too. Guidry’s point is that the same book holding the gospel of Jesus Christ also holds “unspeakable horrors and these unspeakable terrors,” and that these passages are “there to be proclaimed just like Romans eight.” If Scripture itself refuses to look away, a pulpit that does so is less faithful to the text, not more.
Her doctoral work in homiletics addressed how to preach against rape culture in Black churches, and she insists it “must be done with extreme care and with extreme responsibility.” Her counsel is specific. Pray first. Assume survivors are in the room. Give a plain warning before reading the text. Do the research. Arrange prayer, care and even counseling afterward, because “you don’t want to rip off a bandaid or scratch off a scab and then send bleeding people out into the world.” A sermon that opens a wound has taken on an obligation to the people it opened. And the good news is not optional: “the good news has got to always be that this was not God’s idea.” God, she says, “still has use and need for your voice and your life and your ministry in the kingdom of God.”
What happens when the abuser is the pastor everyone loves?
This is where the mirror is hardest to look into. Guidry names clergy as frequent perpetrators, which she treats as a distinct kind of harm because people look to clergy for spiritual leadership. Receiving the opposite from the person entrusted with your soul is, in her words, “extremely disorientating.” The betrayal damages a survivor’s sense of who God is, not only her trust in one man.
Congregations resist the truth for a predictable reason. They watch a leader feed families and change lives, and they cannot reconcile that with private violence against a spouse or a member, so they keep the version they admire. But public good and private harm are both facts, and one does not erase the other. Being used by God has never been proof of safety.
Guidry argues that justice belongs to the church’s work alongside healing. She anticipates the pushback that “a lot of church people wanna be like, well, that’s not my thing, but it should be our thing.” In practice, justice “means, like, we call out our pastors, we call out the deacons, we call out the Sunday school teacher who abused their power.” Jude 3 Project holds that the failures of leaders are real and grievous, and that they are not the same as the failure of Christ. That distinction is what makes accountability possible without despair. Exposing a leader does not expose the gospel as false. Covering for him is what puts the church’s witness at risk.
What does a congregation owe the woman who speaks?
Speaking out is risky and costly, Guidry warns, and “when you speak out, sometimes it can feel even more isolating than the initial act of abuse.” Part of the reason is that others who were harmed, or who knew, stayed quiet. “Their silence is their complicity, and it allows the violence to continue to happen.”
Her response is public solidarity: surround her, stand with her openly, and make sure she knows she is not fighting alone. She credits sisterhood among women with sustaining her in ministry, and she widens the circle, noting that “we are all looking for a few good men” willing to admit abuse is happening in their own church and stand against it. A survivor should never be pressed to reconcile with an abuser or keep a matter in-house to protect a ministry. Where a crime may have occurred, and especially where a child is involved, the church’s role includes supporting a report to the proper authorities, not replacing them. Seeking therapy is not a failure of faith, and trained counselors belong in this care.
If you are experiencing abuse at home, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233. If you are in immediate danger, contact local emergency services.
Guidry’s sharpest claim is that silence is not neutral. Every congregation already contains people who know something: the deacon who heard a rumor, the friend who was told in confidence, the member who noticed and looked away. Rape culture survives on their quiet. So the most concrete thing #MeToo asks of a church is not a statement or a sermon series. It asks the people who know to stop being the reason the violence continues, and to be standing beside her, in public, when she speaks.