Tell us about yourself: who are you and what do you do?
I currently work as the Michael Ramsey Professor of Modern Theology at the University of Kent. I’ve been an academic at different universities for nearly twenty-five years now (that time’s gone very quickly…!) and over that time my work has crossed over a number of disciplines including sociology, history and practical theology.
Although my research has been on quite an eclectic set of issues, a fundamental interest I’ve had through this work is on what values shape people’s lives and the role that moral meanings play in society. Over the past eight years, I’ve become increasingly interested in issues of historic abuse, particularly in how abuse took place in welfare initiatives that were ostensibly seen as morally defensible in the past. Part of what I’ve learned through that process is to recognise how welfare interventions like the industrial school system in Ireland or native residential boarding schools in Canada weren’t necessarily seen as morally unproblematic in the past, but that these systems carried on for a range of reasons despite knowledge of their failings. Recognising this is important. Sometimes organisations look at histories of institutional abuse in their work and argue that this took place in the context of well-intentioned initiatives that were simply less enlightened than today’s standards. The reality is often more complex and more uncomfortable than that.
Over the past seven years, I’ve become increasingly involved in researching the history of British child migration schemes that sent around 100,000 children to other parts of the British Empire and Commonwealth between 1869 and 1970. These schemes were often funded by British and overseas governments, but run by leading charities and major churches. I’m particularly interested in the schemes which operated in the post-war period which ran increasingly against the grain of progressive child-care thinking of that time, and in understanding the institutional and policy factors which made that possible.
How does your research or your work connect to activism?
I’m really interested in how we can take academic research on institutional abuse and make it accessible to different public audiences. I’ve been lucky enough to have been involved in a number of projects along these lines. In 2014, I worked with researchers in Ireland and the digital channel TrueTube to put together a film on women’s experiences of life in Magdalene Laundries in Ireland. I’ve co-curated a national exhibition about the history of British child migration at the V&A Museum of Childhood, and learned a lot through that about how objects and images can be presented in ways that make people more aware of complex and emotionally difficult histories. As a spin-off project from that exhibition, I was able to work with the production company 7digital to commission a number of leading British folk musicians who created a collection of songs, ‘The Ballads of Child Migration’ which has been released as an album and been performed at different venues around the country. I see part of this work – particularly in relation to the child migration schemes – as raising awareness of a history that’s not always well known. Another part of that is trying to think about what the factors are that give rise to institutional abuse, some of which might still be relevant today.
More recently I’ve become involved in supporting the work of two national child abuse Inquiries which have looked at the historic abuse of British child migrants as an expert witness. Working with another colleague, Stephen Constantine, we spent most of a year doing archival research that informed the report on British child migration by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. I learned more through that work about how historical research can go beyond just providing context for public investigations into historic abuse to develop more forensic analysis of archival sources which helps to show how and why systems of care failed. By looking at organisational correspondence and reports in Britain and Australia, for example, it was possible to piece together how the British Government had failed to put proper safeguards in place to ensure that standards of care for British child migrants were adequate.
Why is activism important to you and what do you hope to achieve between now and the 16 Days of 2020?
I came from a non-traditional background as a student and am always conscious – despite the pressures of modern academic life – of the considerable resources we still have in our universities. I’ve always thought that our research should be put to the service of wider communities and that this work should feed back into how we think our academic disciplines should be cultivated and taught.
I’ve been working with the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry over the past year and the work I’ve done with them is going to come into the public domain next spring (so can’t talk about it much yet, unfortunately!) – but I hope that will take forward a bit further some of our understanding of the circumstances in which British child migrants were abused. I think there’s a growing critical mass of people doing very important work on religion and abuse across a range of settings and I want to continue to think about how I can best support that. I’m also going to start publishing work more specifically on historic abuse of child migrants sent overseas by the Catholic Church and (hopefully) the Church of England which will hopefully be available over the next year. More ideas are the pipeline as well…
For many years, Romans 1:18-32 has been considered the central biblical text referencing same-gender relationships, with innumerable interpretations arising from it. Paul wrote Romans 1 due to his unease about people privileging themselves and their desires over worshipping God. He discusses the sin of human egotism and immodesty, as well as praising false idols (Punt 2007, 965-67). In MacArthur’s sermon, he adopts a conservative reading of this passage, deeming the Bible to be explicitly condemning homosexuality. Referencing Romans 1:24, MacArthur speaks of God’s abandonment of the nation that is contaminated by selfishness and vanity: “He gives them over to the lusts of their hearts to impurity.” This “impurity” is widely understood as sexual sin, implying that Paul’s Greco-Roman society has become obsessed with sex. Continuing, MacArthur references Romans 1:26-27: “Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.” In a wild stretch of the imagination, MacArthur correlates this “due penalty” with the twentieth-century HIV/AIDS epidemic and the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases. Through a very literal interpretation of this passage, MacArthur states that God’s abandonment of our world has lead to a sexual revolution, followed by a “homosexual revolution” that apparently we are living through right now.
We can best identify and explore these contradictions in MacArthur’s logic by drawing from Joel Baden’s (2014) conceptualisation of the Bible as a 
The Nature Network provides support and community, advocacy, resources, advice, and a social justice platform for its members but, like other LGBTQ+ people and other refugees, too, they are a vulnerable community. Homophobia in all its insidious and often violent forms is very much present in Nairobi, as it is in very many other places. Added to that, like refugees elsewhere, community members are struggling in the face of economic uncertainties, poverty and all the vulnerabilities these bring with them. The range of members’ needs is complex and varied. Many suffer from unmet health problems, including mental health issues, and all live with various kinds of uncertainty regarding employment, economic security, and future prospects. Many are awaiting decisions from 
Chris’s second book is called 
Christian women are a very vulnerable group who, in the main, wait longer to seek help for domestic violence than their secular sisters.
The document, at least in its English version, often fails to distinguish between sex, sexuality and gender (though it is worth acknowledging that in several other languages, the same nuances do not necessarily exist as in English, and vocabulary such as sexe must do broader work). So, in English, the document thereby finds itself hoist by its own petard: we are told, “The Christian vision of anthropology sees sexuality as a fundamental component of one’s personhood. It is one of its modes of being, of manifesting itself, communicating with others, and of feeling, expressing and living human love”. If, as in common usage, “sexuality” is basically synonymous with “sexual orientation”, here we have the Vatican seeming to maintain that such orientation is ontological, irreducible, and inextricable from the concept of the self: not, in fact, something easily relegated as disordered, or indeed separable from the psyche all told. Of course, this is probably not what the authors intended, since it becomes clear from the document (implicitly at the start, and explicitly later on) that sex and sexuality are to be considered inextricable and basically identical. In fact, for the authors, it is (biological) sex that is the irreducible thing, not orientation – and it is biological sex on which orientation and gender expression must supervene.
That intersex and transgender are not the same thing is hardly esoteric, obscure information. The document, then, seems wilfully to conflate intersex and trans people, and repeats the outmoded claim that where intersex arises in infants, early corrective surgery is not only legitimate but actually necessary. If the sex binary is so vulnerable that the bodies of unusually-sexed infants must be operated on in order to shore it up lest the whole edifice crumble, that tells us something important about how secure and stable the concept was (or, rather, wasn’t) in the first place.
In a number of our courses, we introduce students to biblical texts that depict various forms of gender violence. We don’t include these texts to shock or antagonize our students, or to provide them with the classroom equivalent of clickbait. We do it because, like it or not, these “texts of terror” are in the Bible. For some Christian students, this may come as a surprise, as the biblical texts we talk about are rarely the focus of church sermons or Bible study groups. For non-Christian students, there is often a sense of disbelief that a book which carries huge religious and cultural weight contains such problematic portrayals of gendered violence. But to exclude these texts from our course syllabi and lecture schedules would be doing our students a huge disservice; for, to properly understand the Bible, we must have the integrity to confront it in its entirety, regardless of how tough the ensuing conversations might prove.
Yet, within our classrooms, conversations about the Bible and gender violence are not always easy to negotiate. We engage with biblical scholarship in a bicultural country, and, situated in Auckland, we are located in one of the most ethnically diverse cities within that country. Our classrooms reflect this diversity. Some of our students belong to cultures that embrace traditional gender roles and hierarchies, which normalize and sustain various forms of gender violence. How do we critique such violence when, for some of these students, it is so closely woven together with their own cultural identities? How do we challenge the unacceptable violence of patriarchy, misogyny, and all forms of intolerance to LGBT communities, while still being sensitive to others’ investment in their cultural traditions? To what extent can we invite our students to critique the traditional underpinnings of their own cultures, particularly when we ourselves do not belong to these cultures? These are incredibly thorny questions, which highlight that issues of colonization and marginalization constantly intersect with discourses of gender violence. We are conscious of the fact that, as educators who self-identify as Pākehā, we always run the risk of “colonizing” our students’ own cultural contexts, of prioritizing our western value systems and ideologies over their own diverse worldviews. At the same time, however, we must always invite them to join us in our quest to each scrutinize our own cultural traditions with integrity, and to acknowledge that all of our cultures and communities are, to some extent at least, complicit in sustaining the discourses that enable gender violence to flourish.
Moreover, Christian readers of the Bible (be they students, academics, or otherwise) often resort to performing an impressive display of interpretive gymnastics to sanitize the text and preserve its sacred reputation in which they are so heavily invested. Prophetic re-enactments of spousal abuse are dismissed as “harmless metaphors”; biblical laws that sanction wartime rape are justified as “relatively humanitarian” compared to other Ancient Near Eastern legal codes; and biblical heroes such as Abraham and David, who perpetrate unequivocal acts of gendered violence, are excused because they are “doing God’s work,” playing a vital role in Israel’s (and ultimately Christianity’s) wider redemptive narrative. Meanwhile, biblical texts that offer a potentially subversive alternative to cisheteronormative discourses—such as the David and Jonathan narratives (1 Sam 19–20; 2 Sam 1), the book of Ruth, the Samson and Delilah saga (Judg 16), the Judas kiss (Mark 14:43–45), and the eunuch traditions (Isa 56:3–5; Acts 8:27–39)—are typically given very “straight” readings, with their queer potentialities either ignored, ridiculed, or denied.
