Brentwood Academy, Rape Allegations and a Weird Definition of Christianity

There are two things that I would think are pretty indisputable about Jesus:

1. That he is on the side of the weak and downtrodden, especially and specifically children, because he says it’d be better for you to commit suicide in a way that ruins a miller’s business than for you to harm a child.

2. That he isn’t out to make the lives of people in authority easier: Check him out overturning the tables in the temple and lecturing the scribes and the Pharisees and shooting off his mouth until the people in authority executed him.

It’s just not possible to imagine a child who’s been raped coming to Jesus and being met with: “Well, what can you do? I can’t keep an eye on everyone all the time.”

On Wednesday, Elaina Sauber and Dave Boucher over at The Tennessean reported that the mother of a Brentwood Academy student is suing the school on his behalf because Brentwood Academy allegedly did nothing while her son was sexually assaulted by other students numerous times.

The allegations in the lawsuit are terrible. I’m not going to go into the details of what allegedly happened to the then-sixth-grader. But I do want to focus on the evil the administration at Brentwood Academy allegedly perpetrated. (In a follow-up story, Brentwood Academy headmaster Curt Masters says he heard about "inappropriate activity," and not rape allegations.)

The world is hard and often sucks. Sometimes kids do terrible things to each other. Part of running a school is making sure the kids have a decent learning environment, which definitely means keeping them from raping each other.

Every school official who knew of these assaults had a legal obligation to report them. There is no “I’m Christian; I don’t have to follow the law” exception to mandatory reporting. There’s also no requirement in Christianity for you to let someone repeatedly sexually assault you because otherwise it’s super inconvenient for the adults around you.

Not reporting because you don’t want to “ruin” the perpetrators’ lives is bullshit that prioritizes their well-being over the victim’s, but it’s familiar bullshit. What this lawsuit alleges isn’t that. This lawsuit alleges that the administrators didn’t want to report it because it was too much work for them. They didn’t even want to try to stop this from happening to anyone else, because it was, allegedly, too much work for them.

I mean, you want to be chilled to your bones? These “good Christian” administrators allegedly “separated” a couple of the boys who were involved from the academy and gave a couple of the others in-school suspensions. AND THEN TOLD NO ONE. So these kids are out there somewhere, going to school with other kids.

How common do you think it is that a kid who would rape another kid multiple times and then mock his victim and joke about the rapes with his friends grows out of it without any kind of intervention? If these allegations are true, those kids already have multiple sexual assaults under their belts. And do we think that kid was their only victim? Or will be?

It cannot be the “proper” or “Christian” response to a situation like this to unleash kids who would do this on some other unsuspecting population.

Feminists are often accused of “man-hating,” but I cannot for the life of me imagine a more vile opinion of men than to think that a natural part of being a man is being a rapist — that men, by nature, destroy the people around them and the only thing to do about it is to endure it.

I reject that, just on principle. I know too many good men, men who aren’t rapists, men who wouldn’t stand idly by while a child was being raped, men who don’t hurt other people for fun. I mean, it’s just self-evident that “rapist” or “rapist-enabler” isn’t the natural state of all men.

But there’s something especially gross about hearing this kind of reasoning from self-professed Christians. Yes, Christians believe that people come into this world sinful. But they believe people can be redeemed, that Christ can change people.

No Christian leader should ever so thoroughly give up on men that, when he hears of an allegation of the rape of a child, he shrugs and tells the child to turn the other cheek.

Jesus is on the side of the child who was raped. I accept it to be true that Jesus also loves the children who raped him, too.

But the adults who allegedly tried to use this victim’s faith to persuade him and his family to not report this? To tolerate this? To, as Matthew and Luke both put it, “stumble” or “fall away”?

Well, I’m sure I don’t have to tell such “good Christians” what Jesus said about the likes of them, but it wasn’t, “Boys will be boys.”