Religious sex abuse—sex abuse that happens within religious communities, sex abuse perpetrated by religious authorities, and/or sex abuse enabled, concealed, and protected by religious institutions—is massively undertheorized in and by the field of religious studies. Religious sex abuse is hard to talk about. It hurts to read these stories, to dwell on the terrible things we do to one another. Most of us in religious studies have not been trained to do so and are perhaps unsure how to proceed.

Abusing Religion combines literary criticism, legal history, media analysis, and religious studies theory to parse not only how religious sex abuse happens, but also what work stories of religious sex abuse do in the world. If sex abuse is common, and it is, so too must be our efforts to understand and dismantle its causes.

I argue that narratives of contraceptive nationalism—stories that attempt to defend the American body politic from insemination by religious outsiders by portraying them as sexual threats—minoritize religious outsiders through allegations of sexual abuse. It’s not that sexual abuse doesn’t happen in minority religious communities: sexual abuse happens everywhere.

Sex abuse is an American problem, not (merely) a religious one.