Gender violence, rape culture, and religion—how do we even begin to make sense of the complex intersections that exist between these phenomena? Observe the following.

In 2013, the chairman of the Samoan Council of Churches publicly blamed increased rates of reported rape in Samoan society on the erosion of Christian values; he also suggested that women (and girls) should fight their attackers physically, otherwise their consent could be implied (Samoa Observer 2013). Three years earlier, a United Nations Population Fund report (2010) emphasized the vital role that Pacific Island churches play in providing education and resources to tackle the causes and prevention of gender violence.

Since 2014, there have been countless reports about the abduction and rape of hundreds of Yazidi women and girls from Northern Iraq by members of Islamic State (Callimachi 2015). Many of these women and girls are sold into sex slavery, where they are raped repeatedly by their “owners,” some of whom insist that this behaviour is acceptable to (or even sanctioned by) Islamic texts and traditions (ibid.). Meanwhile, some survivors of wartime rape carried out during the 1994 civil war in Rwanda testify that their Christian faith communities have offered them life-saving sanctuary and healing in the aftermath of their assault, while others are confronted with only stigma and hostility from the Christian churches to which they belong (Mukamana and Collins 2006).

During the 1980s, the World Council of Churches initiated a campaign called Thursdays in Black to tackle the ongoing crisis of wartime rape, gender injustice, and gender violence. In 2016, the campaign was relaunched in universities throughout Aotearoa New Zealand¹ as a grassroots student movement working to end campus rape. The revival of this movement in Aotearoa was incredibly timely, given the New Zealand Human Rights Commission had just issued a report, which highlighted the “pervasive” violence perpetrated against women and children in Aotearoa (2016, p. 36).

In 2014, the US Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution to “oppose steadfastly” any attempts by governing bodies and cultural communities to “validate transgender identity as morally praiseworthy” ( Southern Baptist Convention 2014). A few years later, in 2017, the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, Australia, donated one million dollars to a campaign which was lobbying Australians to vote against same-sex marriage in a government postal survey (McGowan 2017a). Days after this donation was announced, the Anglican Diocese of Perth passed a motion offering a “heartfelt apology” to Australia’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and questioning (LGBTIQ) community, “whom we have hurt by words and behaviour that have not displayed the love of God” (McGowan 2017b). Expressing a need to atone for the symbolic violence of homophobia and transphobia that has marked the church’s history, the motion urged Anglicans to “demonstrate our repentance in changed attitudes and conduct” (ibid.).

News reports and events such as these testify to the multifaceted and complex relationships that exist between religion and gender violence, including the subjective violence of rape and domestic abuse, the symbolic violence of misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic intolerance, and the structural violence of cisheteropatriarchal power structures.² These events also highlight the significant roles that religious texts, traditions, practices, and belief systems can play in both interrogating and perpetuating a range of myths and misperceptions that lie at the heart of rape cultures—cultures that conceptualize gender violence as an “inevitable” or even profitable outcome of normative gender roles and relationships. These myths articulate a powerful cultural acceptance of slut shaming and victim blame, female sexualization and objectification, “naturally” aggressive (cishetero)masculinity, and victims who are “damaged goods”; together, such myths interweave to create environments in which various types of violence against people of all genders can continue unchallenged or even flourish. And thus religions—existing as they do within these rape cultures—inevitably confront and engage with this violence in myriad different ways, exerting a powerful influence on people’s understanding of gender relationships and shaping their responses to gender and gender violence within their own sociocultural contexts.

The chapters in this volume therefore engage with these issues, each contributor considering some of the ways that religions intersect with contemporary cultural discourses of gender, sexuality, gender violence, and rape culture. These intersections are particularly potent, given the authority that religious texts and teachings can have on determining their adherents’ attitudes towards sex and gender, which in turn direct them to either challenge, confirm, query, or redefine rape myths and gender violence narratives. Unique to this volume, our contributors explore such intersections from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including anthropology, theology, biblical studies, gender and queer studies, politics, modern history, art history, development studies, film and media studies, linguistics, religious studies, and English literature. Together, these interdisciplinary approaches resist the tendency to oversimplify the complexity of the connections between religion, gender violence, and rape culture; rather, they offer readers a multi-vocal and multi-perspectival view of this crucial subject.

The volume does not claim to be exhaustive in its analysis of this topic; we are acutely aware that a number of important issues have not been addressed within the following chapters, including religious discourses around male rape, Western conceptions of gender violence in Islam, and the complicity of Hindu traditions and teachings in India’s pandemic rates of gender violence. Related to this, we acknowledge that the majority of our chapters focus predominantly on Jewish or (especially) Christian traditions. None of these features of the volume were intentional—the topics covered in the following chapters are indicative of the dominant preoccupations of current research into gender violence and religion. And, although we did seek contributors who could engage with a more diverse range of issues, there were times when we simply could not find anyone willing (or able) to address these perspectives. Nevertheless, we hope that the volume will offer readers the inspiration to begin or continue their own research within these neglected subject areas, thereby widening conversations around the devastating effects of rape culture and gender violence in communities the world over.

To begin this interdisciplinary exploration of gender violence, rape culture, and religion, the first three chapters of the volume invite us to turn our eyes southward to consider the crisis of gender violence enveloping Oceania. In Chap. 2, Penelope Schoeffel, Ramona Boodoosingh , and Galumalemana Steven Percival explore understandings of gender roles and gender violence within rural Samoan villages, applying approaches from development studies and filmmaking as their theoretical key. Using Percival’s 2015 documentary on gender violence in Samoa (“Raise the Sennit Sail”) as the starting point for their discussion, they consider the complicity of Samoan cultural and Christian traditions in perpetuating gender inequalities, gender violence, and rape-supportive social discourses. Samoa is a country whose cultural identity has become irrevocably intertwined with Western ideations of Christian piety, brought over to these islands during the colonial period. Schoeffel, Boodoosingh , and Percival discuss the implications of this, drawing on theories of performativity to consider the cultural functions of discourses that render gender violence an accepted part of Samoan culture.

Staying within the Pacific Islands, in Chap. 3, anthropologist Jean Louis Rallu explores the traditional, pre-contact relations between women and men in Melanesia, tracing the changes to sexual and social mores that took place within traditional Melanesian societies under Christianization and colonization. Rallu then considers some of the recent challenges faced by nongovernmental and intergovernmental International Organizations in the Pacific Islands in their attempts to confront gender inequality and gender violence in this region. Evaluating the multiple effects of tradition, Christianization, and colonization on gender relationships and gender violence, he inquires how these have impacted later dialogue and cooperation between International Organizations and Pacific Island communities.

Chapter 4 travels from Pacifica to nearby Aotearoa New Zealand, where feminist historian Harriet Winn traces the origins and development of Thursdays in Black, a grassroots activist movement to combat global gender violence, developed by the World Council of Churches in the 1980s. Revived in 2015 as a student-led group campaigning against campus rape, Thursdays in Black NZ has become a timely response to the urgent crisis of sexual violence within Aotearoa. Winn outlines the religious origins of this movement, before exploring its attempts to combat sexual violence within Aotearoa in contextually specific ways, particularly with regard to its commitment to feminist praxis and its adoption of mātauranga Māori—Māori knowledge—as a core part of the movement’s identity and philosophy.

In Chap. 5, Breann Fallon shifts our attention over to the African continent, where she explores the critical issue of genocidal wartime rape from a religious studies perspective. Focusing on the 1994 civil war in Rwanda, she discusses the impact that rape during conflict can have on survivors’ personal faith and relationships with their religious communities. Drawing on first-hand accounts from survivors of sexual violence during this conflict, she discerns the immediate and long-term impacts such violence has had on the faith of survivors, concluding that personal faith should be a key consideration for care providers in structuring wartime rape victims’ recovery and rehabilitation.

In Chap. 6, Valerie Hobbs uses theories from applied linguistics to study the gendered discourses in online Christian sermons on divorce, which either compromise or espouse efforts to combat violence against women. Through close linguistic analysis of some of these sermons, she notes that a significant number of pastors use euphemism to talk about violence, frequently identify divorce (rather than spousal abuse) as an act of violence, and appeal to biblical or religious authority to justify their insistence that women remain in violent relationships. Hobbs argues that these findings indicate a need for members of religious communities to examine closely the ways that their own discourses promote rape culture.

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