For Our Daughters. Directed by Carl Byker. Streaming on YouTube, 2024. 29 minutes.

Fault Lines: Confessions, Silence, and Child Abuse: Secrets of the Clergy. Director of Photography, Erik Ljung. Distributed by Al Jazeera, 2023. 27 minutes.

For Our Daughters and Confessions, Silence, and Child Abuse center lived experiences from victims of sexual abuse occurring in religious communities. Both films examine the context of religious environments and the ways in which the power structures of these spaces create and sustain ecologies of violence against women and children. For Our Daughters is about the ways that Evangelicalism can enable sexual abuse of women, specifically within larger organizations like the Southern Baptist Convention, by drawing connections between Christian nationalism and patriarchy and by using religious doctrine that supports these ideologies. Confessions, Silence, and Child Abuse: Secrets of the Clergy also asks the viewer to consider connections between unchecked power structures and abuse by exploring the legislation around mandatory reporting of child abuse. As both films rely heavily on testimonies from survivors of abuse, when teachers use them in the classroom, it will be critical to include a content warning and provide alternative options for students who might be retraumatized in viewing them.

For Our Daughters emphasizes the negative impact of having to watch perpetrators be “restored” within their communities with little to no attention given to the victims of abuse, and throughout the film, survivors speak about how these experiences were retraumatizing. It is crucial to consider the pain of victims in these contexts. As the film highlights, all too often communities will avoid the work of understanding victims’ stories due to the difficulty of holding space for pain. Trauma theorist Judith Herman explains this phenomenon in Trauma and Recovery, writing, “It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. . . . The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain” (2015, 10). The stories featured in For Our Daughters offer an opportunity for communities to share the weight of this pain, and there is a rich discussion to be had in classrooms that could help students engage in work at the intersection of religious trauma and feminist theory.

While Confessions, Silence, and Child Abuse also draws attention to the systems of abuse in the church, this documentary relies on a few particular stories to illustrate the issues of power and male domination in insular religious communities, focusing, in particular, on mandatory reporting when child abuse is disclosed to religious leaders. There is much to take away from how the film covers state laws that do not require clergy to report sexual abuse under the constitutional banner of religious freedom. Similar to For Our Daughters, one of the key concerns is the impact of Christian nationalism as it continues to grow in relation to alt-right movements in the United States. For example, Christian nation-building has been used to support the idea that women are designed by God to be wives and mothers, and sexual submission is at the center of this ideology. When submission to male authority is a requirement, covering up sexual abuse may follow if leaders do not see it as abuse, believing that women and children must submit to this authority. As I have written elsewhere, “Misogyny rooted in religious systems answers only to a male God, leaving little room for voices of dissent” (Houser and Özyeşilpınar 2024).

Both films would be well paired with texts from the field of religious studies like Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence by Sara Moslener (2015) or Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics by Marie Griffith (2017). Excerpts from these two books would provide a structural background for classroom discussion on how religion, gender, and Christian nationalism interanimate the issue of sexual violence within and outside religious communities. Given the context of trauma, it would also be worthwhile to explore texts like Herman’s Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice (2023) or the well-known book from Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014). These works provide significant context for trauma’s effects on bodies and communities, and it would be a worthwhile endeavor to help students situate the content of these films within the discussion on trauma as it applies to religious violence.

Victoria Houser is an assistant teaching professor in the Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research centers on cultural and feminist rhetorics with specific attention to gender, sexuality, reproductive justice, and religious trauma. Her dissertation, “Altared Bodies: Evangelical Purity Rhetorics in the Age of Sexual Politics” (2021), won the Victor J. Vitanza Outstanding RCID Dissertation in 2022 and was one of three finalists for the Religious Communication Association’s Top Dissertation award in 2022. She has recent scholarship in Theology and Sexuality, Intraspection, Constellations, and Canopy Forum, and she is currently working on a book manuscript that focuses on the rhetorics of purity culture and religious trauma.