The Purity Trap

These women went to Bible college to deepen their faith. Then they were assaulted— and blamed for it.

- By Becca Andrews. Photographs by Kim Raff and Zoë van Dijk

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 tofficentral 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.