So I’m sitting at the reference desk and this scholar dude who’s been using our reference books to write an article is on the phone/a video call with someone. He’s talking about all sort of Biblical topics with the person on the other end of the line, and he brings up how in a sermon he talked about this “really disturbing story” from Judges 19 where this concubine who (according to this dude) is abused by her master, is given over to a male gang who wanted to rape him, is raped all night and then dies at the door of the house the man is staying in. The man then proceeds to cut her body up into 12 pieces and sends each piece to each house of Israel, inciting a civil war. He used this story in a sermon about uplifting women!!!!! What kind of idiocy, of tone-deaf obliviousness, of lacking sense of what’s appropriate? What kind of idiot wouldn’t say to himself, a college-educated ministerial sort of man, “you know, maybe the story of a sex slave being gang-raped to death isn’t the best story to include in my women-uplifting sermon.” He does not see anything wrong with this whatsoever! And what’s worse is that he’s LAUGHINGLY telling his friend how in the audience some teenage girl was making weird awkward faces, while some teenage boys were laughing--not that they were laughing at the rape and death, he assured his friend, but that they were laughing at the jokes he’d made about it. Or they were not jokes directly about the concubine’s rape and murder, but were still made adjacent to it. I repeat, he did not see anything wrong with this, and expressed no discomfort or regret about it.
Later on in his conversation, he tells his friend how in some church service he’d been part of, the girl in charge of telling the children’s story decided it would be a good idea to tell the story of when God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac his first-born son on the altar instead of the ram. And he expressed to his friend how the girl cheerfully and systematically described the story and how exactly Isaac [a child] would be killed on the altar to a bunch of five-year-olds, ending it with, “and that’s why we should always obey God.” I think this dude was quite right in feeling uncomfortable with the telling of this violent, child-death-adjacent story to a bunch of impressionable children, but I find it staggering that he could care about children being traumatized from a children’s story but not how women and girls could be traumatized by a story of rape and misogynistic murder in a sermon explicitly for them. I can guarantee you that there were women and girls in his audience that had already experienced sexual violence and assault, and they may have very well found this part of the sermon triggering. This lack of common sense and empathy is just staggering to me and it could be the caffeine but I’m honestly shaking in rage. Shit like this is why I don’t trust men, even 'good' religious men.
