Pentecostal Studies Face the #MeToo Movement

Abstract

In 1944 Recy Taylor, a pentecostal woman, was walking home from a service at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama, when she was kidnapped and gang-raped by six white men. She was twenty-four years old. None of the six men was ever charged. Though the rape was extensively covered in the African American press, few people in the pentecostal community of scholars, even the historians, had ever heard her name until she died in December 2017 and her obituary was published in the New York Times. A few weeks after that obituary appeared, Oprah Winfrey significantly raised the profile of this pentecostal sister when she told Recy's story during her Golden Globe acceptance speech in January 2018. Her story was recovered by historian Danielle L. McGuire in her 2011 book1 and is documented in a film, "The Rape of Recy Taylor."2 The tale is horrific, tragic, and maddening in its lack of justice. But as the #metoo and #churchtoo revelations have made known, what happened to Recy is an all too common reality. Gymnast Rachael Denhollander, a victim of Larry Nassar's sexual abuse at the age of fifteen and the first to come forward, gives a sad indictment of the church when she states, "Church is one of the least safe places to acknowledge abuse because the way it is counseled is, more often than not, damaging to the victim. There is an abhorrent lack of knowledge for the damage and devastation that sexual assault brings. It is with deep regret that I say the church is one