Kiera Feldman’s recent New Republic [3] report on the convergence of rape culture and evangelical culture at a private Christian university in Virginia is a deeply troubling story. It’s also a disturbingly familiar one.

In a series of interviews with female survivors of sexual violence at Patrick Henry College, Feldman uncovered an institutional pattern of victim-blaming and impunity for perpetrators that was grounded in the school’s strict adherence to evangelical doctrine, specifically its ‘gender complementarian” norms and toxic purity culture.

Though generally viewed as a safe haven for young people with an evangelical Christian worldview, Patrick Henry College turned out to be a very dangerous place to be a survivor of sexual assault. It is, in other words, much like everywhere else in this country.

Evangelical Christianity makes visible – through purity pledges and doctrine assigning women the role of man’s ‘helpmate” – the norms and expectations about female virginity and subservience that so often remain hidden in the secular world. While it may be tempting to draw a red line around Christian fundamentalist views on gender and sexuality to distinguish them from supposedly evolved ‘secular” culture, there is considerable, uncomfortable overlap between the two.

Here are four ways ‘secular” American culture mirrors Christian […]