Abusing God: Reading the Bible in the #metoo age

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Abusing God: Reading the Bible in the #metoo age is a collaborative network of experienced academic researchers, church practitioners and key stakeholder charities working together to develop contemporary research that responds to increasing awareness of and concern about gender based violence, and to effect change on the academic research agenda around the Bible and abuse within a Christian context. The Sophia Network's 'Minding the Gap' report (2019) recently demonstrated that although women make up 65% of the church in the UK, 62% of these women have experienced some form of sexism in church. This data, along with Refuge's report of a surge in gender-based violence following global lockdowns and resultant cuts to key support services during the Covid-19 pandemic that means it is more crucial than ever that researchers and professionals engaged in the support of survivors work together to bring about culture change around abuse within Christian communities.The proposed Network will respond to this concerning context in three key ways. First, it will facilitate trans-instutitional conversations between academic and church and charity practionters. Secondly, the network will host two colloquia on topics selected by our stakeholders -- the Bible and coercive control and the Bible and hypermasculinity. These events will pair academics with pracitioners to develop reflective, collaborative research papers. In doing so, the network will lead the way on practice informed research, which takes its direction from church and charity practioners who have expertise on the lived experiences of Christian survivors and their relationship to biblical texts. Thirdly, building on the foundation provided by this new academic research, the network also aims to develop an education resource pack for use in schools and/or university chaplaincies in their work with survivors of gender based violence, as well for Bible study or small group support work in Churches. This material will offer recommendations on how to approach biblical texts that address abuse and/or sexual violence with sensitivity for survivors' needs in a way that is supported by contemporary research within the field of biblical studies. While there has been considerable work done on the gender critical issues that are raised by challenging biblical texts in an academic Biblical Studies context, there is comparably little research or development on the impact these texts have on survivors of sexual and domestic abuse who have a personal Christian faith commitment, and even less work aimed at encouraging collabortative work between academic, church, and charity practioners. The resources we aim to develop will respond to this critical need within the UK, by drawing upon both contemporary academic scholarship, as well as the experience of church practitioners and charities in understanding how biblical texts have been used to both contribute to and also prevent gender-based violence.