Vocation and Violence: the Church and #MeToo

Miryam Clough’s Vocation and Violence provides a valuable, unique contribution to Routledge’s Rape Culture, Religion and the Bible series. Using a combination of interviews and autoethnography, Clough draws a vivid picture of the existence of rape culture in the church. Clough opens by describing briefly the #MeToo movement and introducing the reader to its, perhaps less well-known, sister movement, #ChurchToo. The #ChurchToo movement was born when women in American Evangelical churches sought to build on the work of #MeToo and expose the particular situation of male violence against women in the church. (2) Clough migrates the American #ChurchToo movement through the sharing of women’s stories in Anglican churches in the UK and New Zealand. From the basis that ‘[a] high level of cognitive dissonance may occur when respected church leaders are accused of abuse’ (3), Clough shifts the reader’s attention towards her particular project. Her focus is on how such cognitive dissonance may be taken to the extreme in cases which involve vocations. If the victim had been actively exploring their vocation in the church at the time of clergy abuse, Clough asks,