Connecting Experiences of Faith and Feminism: Facing Sexual Violence within the Church

[Editor’s Note: This post was translated from the original Spanish by our Escuchando a las Mujeres team, Lilian and Lorena. You can read it in Spanish here.]

April was Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM) and we hosted the second event of our series Connecting Experiences of Faith and Feminism. This time our subject was Facing Sexual Violence within the Church. We had the opportunity to speak with Alejandra Montalvo, also known as Alethéia Montalvo, who is a Mexican sociologist with a master’s degree in Women Studies. She has participated as a speaker in different conferences in Mexico and other countries discussing subjects such as studies of the body, participation of women in religious evangelical institutions and feminine subjectivities among other topics related to women’s experiences within the Church in the Mexican American borderland. Ale is part of the feminist collectives Meztil. Saberes y estudios feministas y Feminopraxis. Mujeres* Accionando Feminismos (Meztli. Knowledge and feminist studies & Feminopraxis. Women* Actioning Feminisms). Nowadays, she works as a feminist activist doing workshops with feminist perspectives in the city of Tijuana, Mexico; she is also a member of the Harassment Prevention Council of the Faculty of Medicine and Psychology of the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California.

In our conversation with her, Ale invited us to create border free alliances and to work together to create community, to build spaces for women and sexual dissidences that put together the teachings of Jesus as a symbol of liberation of the oppressed.

Ale comes from a conservative Catholic family in Guanajuato, one of the most conservative and Catholic states in Mexico. In the ’90s, Ale and her family were forced to migrate to the United States for economic and safety reasons. After her father was deported back to Mexico, the family had to stay in the border city of Tijuana, a place internationally known as both a multicultural place and also as one of the cities that holds the largest migration traffic from Mexico, Central, and South America. There, Ale’s family was received by the Pentecostal community, which has an important presence in the region. She and her family left Catholicism and joined Pentecostalism.

Ale shared that within her church she was educated under unequal gender expectations, mandates and normative codes related to the bodies of women. She was raised with the dogmatic idea that women’s bodies were “bodies of suspicion” and “bodies that emanated sin.” A sense of rebellion emerged in her like a feminist conciseness that breaks the mandates of ecclesiastical power, which were notably violent against women.

She also shared how social sciences turned out to be a path to recover the joy of spirituality. This came from the logical and objective view that anthropological and sociological studies offered. Afterward, when she recognized herself as a feminist young woman, she began to question everything, especially her religious identity. She has a very interesting view on the confrontation between feminism and the practice of our faith because it highlights the urgent need for reconciliation between both of these practices. They are both critical aspects of the identity of many women. 

For our guest, the Church, which is built as patriarchal institution, contributes to violence against women and said that: 

“[The Church reproduces] messages that keep perpetuating traditional power dynamics between men and women. It assumes that it is natural to women to be responsible for the household, of keeping the family’s honor and to reproduce the moral order in their families.”

She reminds us of something that we have been discussing throughout the month about the Church’s narrative that assigns certain qualities to women, using Mary as the most complete expression of women’s dignity. These narratives tell us that virtuous women are modest, humble, pure, virgins, and obedient to masculine figures, which results in a mandate of silence as a sign of devotion, commitment, and humility. Ale also talks about a second kind of narrative that promotes “femininity associated to an impure body, a body of sin, cursed by the legacy of Eve’s original sin” which demands an “erasure of everything erotic in women creating a rejection and hate towards our bodies.” To quote:

“[The patriarchal biblical interpretation] puts women against our own bodies as our own territories. Our bodies should be a space of liberation, of creation and emancipation. But instead, our body become our first and most important enemy. And we are taught to believe that something evil comes from our bodies. So, when we are sexually abused, we feel guilty and we blame ourselves.”

Ale Montalvo’s reflections invite us to rethink Franca Basaglia’s proposal, retaken by Marcela Lagarde (2014) concerning ecclesial abuse. From this perspective, women exist to serve others and the Holy Scriptures are used to reinforce that. Their patriarchal interpretation “creates a sense of guilt, Christian guilt!” Ale proposes to fight against the patriarchal idea of women’s bodies as property of the Church by contextualizing the scriptures from a feminist perspective. This will eventually result in the de-patriarchalization of the Bible and the institutional practices of the Church that are highly masculine and oppressive. Ale encourages us to face spirituality from a new perspective, to take down the sexist foundational content of the Church’s narratives and break the tradition of silence. 

Breaking these old traditions of oppression will bring us collective healing because our churches and congregations are spaces built on women. We work there and contribute in many ways that are not even recognized.  This is a task that needs to be intersectional and recognize that every single experience of oppression must be heard and counted.

We agree with Ale Montalvo as she proposes a political consciousness of equality in the Church, and highlights the importance of women’s leadership as a critical step to deconstruct its patriarchal structures.  By doing so we will create a restorative culture of justice for all women and specially for those survivors of sexual and power abuse within their churches. 

 “I really hope that we can rethink ourselves outside this patriarchal logic and give women’s voices the relevance they deserve”.

If you understand Spanish, we invite you to listen to the whole conversation with Ale Montalvo. We also invite you to keep an eye on our next posts where we will share more about our guest’s work. You can follow her on Instagram as @aletheiamg.