The Purity Trap
Megan Wohlers thought she had done all she needed to do. And even if she had missed something, she thought, she was on a Christian campus, full of other believers—someone would certainly intervene.
It was the fall of 2016 when the sophomore at Moody Bible Institute, one of the country’s most prestigious evangelical colleges, started the process of getting help to extricate herself from an abusive ex-boyfriend. She tried to be systematic: She spoke with the public safety department at the school, and she wrote a letter to her ex, demanding that he leave her, her family, and her friends alone. She gave copies of the letter to a professor, the Title IX office, and Dean of Students Timothy Arens, who also promised to speak with the boy and tell him to back off. Surely, it would be enough.
It wasn’t.
Now, more than five years later, Wohlers, who’d dreamed of going to Moody since she was 10, whose father was an alumnus, whose ambition was to go to Central Africa to spread the gospel, is one of 11 women who have decided to make public their experiences with sexual abuse at the college. “The school encourages transparency and vulnerability with each other,” Wohlers tells me, “but when you do open up to administration, you get shamed and blamed.”
It is time, they’ve decided, for others to witness what they see as a systemic failure to address sexual misconduct at the school that describes itself as “the world’s most influential Bible college,” the place “where God transforms the world through you.” It is time to expose the people who were tasked with protecting them—under the laws of the country, under the laws of God—but who at best looked the other way, and at worst blamed them for the violence perpetrated against them.
And finally, it is time, they argue, to move beyond the purity culture that has defined Moody—and imperiled women on campus—for far too long. “All the responsibilities are on the girls to be pure,” says Anna Schutte, who graduated from Moody in 2020. “You know, if a guy has a porn addiction and a sex addiction, you should pray for him. But if a girl gets assaulted, it’s her fault.”
A lot of people like Wohlers—young, ambitious, evangelical—set their hearts on Moody Bible Institute at an early age. It is the “Harvard of Christian schools,” says Moody graduate Anna Heyward. “If you want to be a godly person and go into ministry, you go to Moody.”
Founded on the Near North Side of Chicago in 1886 by D.L. Moody, a passionate evangelist, Moody Bible Institute now runs a vast “network of Christian radio stations, affiliates, Internet stations, podcasts, and related programming,” according to its website, as well as a publishing house. Though the student body is under 3,000—about half of whom study online or in graduate programs—the school has long been a central training ground for future generations of church leaders. Mary McLeod Bethune graduated in 1895, and Jerry B. Jenkins, a co-author of the bestselling apocalyptic Left Behind series, is an alumnus, as are a host of influential Christian authors, pastors, and activists.
Women have attended Moody from the start, but for all intents and purposes, men—students and faculty alike—are the spiritual authorities. The reasons for this are both formal and informal, but all are colored by the evangelical belief in complementarianism—that according to God’s perfect design, men and women have separate strengths and weaknesses that together reflect the image of God. The school’s Student Life Guide puts it this way: “Moody Bible Institute believes that humanity came from the hand of God
