It’s Complicated
A Review of
Safe Church: How to Guard Against Sexism and Abuse in Christian Communities
Andrew J. Bauman
Paperback: Baker Books, 2025
Buy now: [ BookShop ] [ Amazon ] [ Kindle ] [ Audible ]
Reviewed by Anne Elrod Whitney
Content Warning:
Deals with themes of sexual harassment/abuse, including a couple of brief stories.
“Good. Annoying. I’m not sure. It’s complicated.”
This was my answer when a pastor friend asked what I thought of Andrew Bauman’s book Safe Church: How to Guard Against Sexism and Abuse in Christian Communities.
Maybe it’s my frustration with its lack of fiery prophetic challenge. It sure seems to me that the persistent and unrepentant abuse and harm that Christians have done (are doing right now!) to women is something to scream and fight about, to incite revolutions about, not to make very cushioned, entry-level suggestions about.
It might be my appreciation that Bauman is at least trying to use his (privileged, white male, insider) voice at the microphone to reach ears that have been closed to women’s voices but that might tolerate his. But that appreciation is short-lived: I confess that, when the author shares stories about his wife’s experiences, my inner Then why isn’t she writing the book? is readily answered by an inner Because they wouldn’t read it? Even my inner voice speaks of futility when it comes to the fate of women in what we profess to be God’s family.
Then there’s my baseline pessimism that tells me that a reasoned argument is not what will smash the church’s patriarchy anyway. Those whose position relies on power (and whose institutions involve money and property) will never cede it just because they’re asked to.
My heart’s core response is sadness, pain and grief. That this book is needed at all is profoundly…annoying. It’s not annoying like a fly near your ear or a pothole on a road; I mean annoying like an old injury in your spine or leg or fingers, so ever-present that you hardly think about it anymore, but in such a frequently-used body part that it keeps flaring up, never fully healed and never not hurting at least a little. A hurt like this can go unmentioned more often than not, and it’s easy to come to a point where nothing really helps anyway. Furthermore, people will only listen to you complain about it for so long before they back away, or label you as “negative” or, God forbid, a whiner. The bumps and bruises and cuts and scars of living in spaces that want to keep us small and manageable are like that.
Bauman presents interview data from Christian women to make the case that sexism and abuse exist, that they are perpetrated not only in the church but also by the church, that this reality is unacceptable for Christians, and that it is church people’s responsibility—and men’s responsibility in particular—to make it right. A therapist whose first career was ministry, Bauman presents this argument simply, even meekly, as if he is choosing as nonthreatening manner as possible to avoid alienating his audience with too strong of a condemnation.
This was, to me, the hardest part of the book. If we’re speaking to the college-aged counselor who sexually abused me when I was 15 or so, I think we need something stronger than an admonition to refrain from making comments that objectify women. We need something much stronger than a plea to avoid porn for the church council member who “playfully” smacked me on the rear end with his choir folder at rehearsal just a few years ago. We need something much stronger for the pastor I reported it to, who told me it was probably due to cognitive decline and therefore understandable. We need something stronger for the board members of large organizations who trade money for nondisclosure agreements, keeping matters quiet for fear of exposing themselves to lawsuits or a spike in insurance rates. It will take something stronger for the Christian camp minister who fails to report what he sees as “flirting” or “romance” between a fifteen-year old lifeguard and a 24-year old counselor but instead reprimands them both for being too demonstrative. For these situations and all the others happening daily, it will take much more than suggesting men engage in some self-reflection and lay off the pornography.
If Bauman’s quiet pitch and encouraging tone is what annoys me most about this book, I also think it’s the book’s best feature. It’s clear that Bauman knows his treatment is far from thorough. His 101-level suggestions and tips, especially in a chapter late in the book addressed specifically to men, are insufficient. However, to me they are like the cut-out footprints laid out on the floor that always appear in cartoon dance lessons. Their appeal is their accessibility, the way they lay out steps in visible order. 1, 2, 3. Surely nobody really learns to dance like that. Yet the steps make it seem at least possible that you might be able to learn. They get you in the door, to sign up for the lessons.
Once you’re in the door of the book, Safe Church concisely argues for an end to patriarchy as it is expressed in organized American Christianity today. Out come the major layers of a centuries-old and deeply embedded problem, in tidy chapters, laid down one by one. Chapters 1 and 2 present basics: sexism exists. It is harmful. Women aren’t making it up. And, most of all: it is on male leaders to do their share of making change, since the problems of sexism themselves diminish women’s ability to accomplish any change by themselves.
These were the chapters that had me eye-rolling, I admit, but then I remember ruefully my own feelings as a young high school teacher, when I came to understand (way too far into my career) that white teachers like me had extra responsibility to teach white students about racism. It was partly because white adults can speak as insiders, narrating our own growth from similar learned cultural biases to explicit antiracist stances. It was also because if we leave it to people of color to do it, they consequently pay an even greater price in student resistance, in backlash, and in sheer fatigue than they already deal with!
The remaining chapters tick off the key boxes for major factors of Protestantism’s woman problem: Chapter 3 traces women’s position in Christian history; Chapter 4 highlights Jesus’s interactions with women in the Gospels; Chapter 5 neatly handles the main “clobber passages” most used to defend women’s oppression; Chapter 6 presents the recent invention of complementarianism and other teachings. Here, then, is an efficient takedown—or at least an unflinching summary—of the weapons that defend discrimination and other wrongs. Bauman then turns to material closer to his expertise as a therapist, describing effects of trauma and the traumatizing context for women in churches today (Chapters 7 and 8). These are followed by “next steps” chapters for men, for those in need of healing, and for church leaders seeking to change; yes, they are the chapters I found so annoying at first. They seem so obvious, like his advice for men to “listen to women” (151).
However, they’re not obvious enough, are they? If these steps were easy, then they would have been taken by now. They have not. It is unfortunately not enough to inform a leader—or a reader of this book—of the problems Bauman addresses here. Women have already been saying they are being harmed. Wouldn’t churches have addressed this if they wanted to? There is a long distance between reporting and enforcement, for (as Bauman’s data affirms) not only must a woman or girl report the problem, but someone must also take action. Women often stay silent—held back by shame, self-blame, or fear of retaliation. Consider this: survivors of child sexual abuse wait, on average, until age 52 to come forward.
Even when people do report abuse, harassment, or discrimination, nothing necessarily happens. Bauman shares interviews in which women tell of being blamed for incidents in which they were victims or were simply not believed. This resonates with the research showing how failure on the part of institutions after sexual assault can impact victims as a “second rape”. If the church is the perpetrator– or has helped to shape the values, beliefs, and customs of the perpetrator— why trust the church with caring for the victim?
It is this double-bind that reveals the potential of Bauman’s Safe Church for Christian readers in 2025. As church attendance in the United States has become less obligatory, and as those who do attend age and pass away while other Christians are born and grow up and eventually step into leadership themselves, there is an opportunity for real change in the ways patriarchy shapes and is maintained by Christian institutions. Younger Christians are growing up in a more diverse society with greater access to information than their predecessors, and young adults who attend church are doing so by choice rather than following along with the crowd. Safe Church is a resource for those who choose to be in Christian community and for those children we choose to raise in it.
Do these young people—and especially, those who are men, to whom the book is directed—know the history of how Christian patriarchy has inflicted such harm on fully one half of God’s people? Do they know that it persists, or that there are ways to move toward greater justice and reconciliation? I think of high school and college students I have taught who, despite a love of justice and commitment to equality, often see racism as something that ended with the Civil Rights Act or sexism as something that ended with the 19th amendment, or as isolated incidents of rudeness or mean jokes rather than as a vast, persistent structure of systemic inequality. What we do not talk about, we protect.
Truly, most of the folks in church on a Sunday morning do not already know that 1 in 6 women have endured sexual assault or child sexual abuse. Many do not know that American women still make just $.85 for every dollar a man makes in the exact same role. Almost no one knows that in denominations where women are ordained, most female clergy—77% in Bauman’s study—report sexual harassment or abuse. Just because it’s everywhere doesn’t mean it’s obvious.
I commend Safe Church to people like those students I taught, whose lives had shielded them thus far from realities that women and people of color learn daily, the hard way. Read it in Sunday School groups of teens and adults, the youth retreat, the young men’s breakfast. Parents, read it with your sons. It is a shortcut into the otherwise hard-to-enter discussions about gender that are long overdue in churches as they are everywhere else. Safe Church lays out the facts, then directly addresses how theology, institutional history, and misogyny have brought those facts to be—and rendered them invisible. Having done so, it proceeds to call individual Christians to face the facts. While its suggestions for action are small, they are actions upon which the larger ones depend.
Anne Elrod Whitney
Anne Elrod Whitney, Ph.D. is the author of InkWell: Simple Writing Practices to Restore Your Soul (Broadleaf Books, 2021) and other books and articles. She is Professor of Education at the Pennsylvania State University, a candidate for ministry in the Lutheran church (ELCA), autistic, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and a mother. For more of Anne’s writing, visit anneelrodwhitney.com.
 Reading for the Common Good From ERB Editor Christopher Smith "This book will inspire, motivate and challenge anyone who cares a whit about the written word, the world of ideas, the shape of our communities and the life of the church." -Karen Swallow Prior Enter your email below to sign up for our weekly newsletter & download your FREE copy of this ebook! |
Understanding Christian Nationalism [A Reading Guide] |
 Most Anticipated Books of the Fall for Christian Readers!
|
 Hilarious One-Star Customer Reviews of Bibles |
