Christian Colleges Haven't Addressed Their Sexual Assault Problems

Lee University, Moody Bible Institute, and many others have faced repeated sexual assault allegations -- without doing anything to address it.

(This article contains descriptions of sexual assault.)

People raised in Christian homes, especially girls, become aware fairly early on that there are a heap of sexual expectations placed upon you. Don’t have sex until marriage. Don’t even think about having sex. Don’t masturbate. If you have a vagina, save your precious hymen for your husband on your wedding night, or you’re a used up piece of gum (or crumpled up paper, or unwrapped Christmas present, depending on which horrible abstinence-only curriculum you had). Don’t wear anything that might make a man think about wanting to have sex with you. Don’t be alone with anyone of the “opposite” gender. All forms of homosexuality are wrong. All forms of gender expression or identity outside of the so-called Biblical roles are wrong. Adultery is bad, and anything other than heterosexual cisgender monogamous sex within the confines of legal American marriage is adultery. Remain pure, remain pure, remain pure: this is the call of purity culture.

So when people raised in Christian homes inevitably enroll in Christian colleges, often the first time in their lives in which they have been offered freedom away from the watchful eyes of overbearing strict religious parents, they come face-to-face with those expectations and temptations in a real way. And the majority of Christian colleges do absolutely nothing to help them with it, and in fact have policies that actively harm their students in regard to sexual assault.

This summer, I enjoyed, from afar, the downfall of Liberty University’s Jerry Falwell Jr. Perhaps too indulgent in my schadenfreude, I pored over the allegations of the cuckoldry, the non-monogamy, the excessive alcohol consumption, the sleazy Instagram photos, the wealth and excess exposed for what it all really was. I had seethed as he publicly expressed support for Trump and Trumpian policies, all the while stating that my alma matter, the Church of God flagship school, Lee University of Cleveland, Tennessee… was far less hypocritical!

Despite my very, very far fall from conservative evangelicalism, I remained somewhat proud of my alma mater. I knew a lot of good, progressive people from there — professors, students, alumni. Part of my graduation requirement had been to do 80 hours of community service, setting me up for a lifetime of community action and volunteering. I’d say the seeds of my progressive Christianity began to grow in my Christian Ethics classes, too, as part of Lee University’s required Bible minor. One of the required reading books was Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, which effectively changed my perspective on poverty. Not only that, while prominent Liberty University students were leaving the school based on its treatment of Black students, Lee was busy arranging peaceful Black Lives Matter protests in the face of my extraordinarily racist areas of Southeast Tennessee, the birthplace of a “Make America White Again” slogan that went viral a few years ago.

In October 2020, however, my perspective of Lee University changed. The Campus Choir director, Jimmy Phillips, someone I vaguely knew personally, had been charged with rape. I was shaking with rage when I got the image of his mugshot from an old classmate a few hours before the published article went up. But when I read the article, I was even angrier: the incident had taken place in 2014, the victim came forward to the university, and NOTHING HAD BEEN DONE. For six years, Phillips was allowed direct contact with students after the university’s “investigation” had revealed, supposedly, nothing.

So then the victim took the case to the Bradley County Police Department instead sometime in 2018, and Phillips was arrested about a year and a half after that. As you might imagine, Bradley County isn’t exactly a hotbed of justice for sexual assault victims, and Tennessee is often considered one of the most corrupt states in the USA according to data analysts. Earlier this year, the jail was a center of a justice reform movement after it was found that inmates were being held in poor conditions during a COVID-19 outbreak. All this to say that if Bradley County Police arrested one of the most popular instructors on the largest campus in the town, it must have been due to some pretty damning evidence.

I was extremely distressed. Had something like this happened before? I hadn’t experienced this, nor heard of anyone who had personally — but that doesn’t mean anything, especially since I haven’t lived in Cleveland, TN since 2014 and graduated from Lee a semester early in December 2009. So I tweeted about it, hoping to get the attention of my writer friends at RELEVANT or Christianity Today or Sojourners, but nothing came of it. Finally, I began to call myself for more stories of sexual assault at Lee on any social media platforms I could find.

Four people came forward, including a friend of the person who had been allegedly raped by Phillips, but none of them were willing to be interviewed, even anonymously. One story, from the ‘80s, talked about sexual assault from a basketball player that went unpunished. Another story involved a school counselor sleeping with a patient (a student) he was counseling. But two stories shared a common thread — female students who were drinking when male students assaulted them against their will. When the women went forward to Campus Safety, they and their male attackers were BOTH punished for drinking on campus. The male students were not suspended.

But not a single person wanted to come forward. They did not want their stories investigated. They did not want to risk their jobs, reputations, and livelihoods. Many of them still live in Cleveland, TN where social and career consequences can be intense: you can and will be fired for crossing the wrong person, subjected to vicious town gossip. One of the people I spoke to even still works with the Church of God! They feel wronged by Lee University, but helpless to stop what happened — and what will likely keep happening.

Lee University has something called a Community Covenant. When you accept entry into the school, you must sign this first. You have to agree to refrain from homosexuality, extramarital sex, premarital sex, and abstain from all drugs, tobacco, and alcohol, among other rules, like mandated chapel and church attendance. If you are caught breaking these rules, you will be punished, whether it’s with a warning, extra community service hours, extra chapel services, suspension, or expulsion.

People who did not grow up in strict households ask themselves, “Why would anyone agree to go to a school like that?” Hah, that’s easy. First of all, for some people, their parents will only agree to let their kids go to Christian colleges, withholding payment or threatening to kick them out if they want to choose another path. For many people, the rules above LOOK like freedom, having come from stricter households where they might not have been allowed to even hang out with people without adult supervision, and were never exposed to opportunities for drugs, sex, or alcohol to begin with. And some of us, like me, went to Christian college because we had family ties there. My grandfather, Dr. Robert O’Bannon, worked as a professor there for over 40 years. There’s a boys’ dorm named after him. Nearly my entire family graduated from Lee.

And despite what you may think, the scholastic quality of the education is pretty good. I was exposed to high-quality textbooks, professors, and teaching methods while there, spent a semester abroad in Cambridge, England, and graduated with a degree in Communications (emphasis Journalism and Media Writing!) a semester early in 2009. A degree which, by the way, I have used fully. I was, and am, a Christian. My experience at Lee University was by-and-large a good one. But clearly, it wasn’t like that for everyone.

So students come to Lee University. Maybe they’re gay and closeted, which was a very common occurrence. Maybe they have sex for the first time, or drink for the first time. Christian college students aren’t that much different from regular college students: they’re curious about sex and alcohol. We are all human beings. If anything, the Christian environment fosters a more harmful way to experience these things. There are no discussions about sexual consent or safety on a campus where you’re not supposed to be having sex. There are no free condoms at the health clinic. There aren’t any seminars on the dangers of excessive binge drinking, because alcohol consumption is forbidden altogether.

So, all of these activities are understood to be secretive. Parties with alcohol take place off-campus; real estate and rentals are very cheap in town. Sex is done secretly, unsafely, anywhere and everywhere students feel like they won’t be caught. For LGBTQ students, closeted or not, the danger is everywhere: anyone caught in open same-sex relations will be expelled. I cannot IMAGINE what Lee’s response would be to a same-sex assault on campus, except that they would almost certainly punish both parties if one dared to come forward. And if a girl gets pregnant? She is suspended for the duration of the pregnancy. The male partner formerly was not so, but my understanding is that if she outs the father, he will also be suspended now, too. How incredibly fucking progressive of them.

Colleges already have a problem of covering up sexual assault, leading “internal investigations” on professors and students who are accused that are not nearly so diligent as criminal investigations, which are themselves not prioritized, with hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits sitting in police evidence rooms as I type. The reputation of the school comes at the expense of the victims. I would wager that the reputation is even more important among Christian colleges, who dutifully want the tuition dollars of nice Christian evangelical parents sending their children to a nice Christian school where they presume their angels won’t be exposed to the horror of sex, drugs, or alcohol, while being forced to attend church and chapel services multiple times weekly.

Lee University certainly isn’t alone in its sexual assault coverups. Moody Bible Institute is currently facing its own accusations as it punishes a student for coming out as a lesbian while a group of students has accused the school of inaction regarding sexual assault, petitioning the school to address the allegations. People have been writing about it for years. But on a personal note, it was really heartbreaking for me to see it come from my own alma mater, the same year that my beloved grandfather who had devoted his life to the school passed away.

Sadly, Lee has not addressed the fact that they allowed an alleged rapist to stay on campus with students for six years other than to say they’d found no proof according to their own investigations. The college president under which the assault took place, Dr. Paul Conn (who was also president while I was there), retired from his position in 2019 and was succeeded by Dr. Mark Walker in 2020. My disappointment in both Dr. Conn and Dr. Walker is an understatement. I’m screaming from the rooftops, but so far, nobody wants to publicly come forward.

And I understand why they don’t want to: while I live life publicly as a polyamorous leftist bashing the tenets of evangelicalism, secure in my secular job, six years and 500 miles removed from my hometown and the influence of my conservative family, in safe relationships with like-minded individuals, enjoying a stable community of supportive friends, a progressive church, and congruent political groups — these people do not have such immense luxuries. They are trapped by evangelicalism, geographically, financially, emotionally, mentally, or otherwise. And when the blame from purity cultures comes tumbling down, maybe they blame themselves for drinking, for wearing something that showed off their legs, midriff, or cleavage, for going to that party, for going in that person’s car… the same things many other sexual assault victims do, too.

The difference is that in theory, at the core of evangelicalism, they CAN safely blame the victim while absolving the accused. And in the case of Lee University, that’s apparently what they’ve exactly decided to do.