There’s a new trigger-warning trend on campus: not for slasher films or violent video games, but for the Greatest Story Ever Told. At the UK’s University of Sheffield, a literature class syllabus warned of “graphic bodily injury and sexual violence” in the gospels as well as in the Genesis account of Cain and Abel.
I’ll admit that the crucifixion was a violent act; after all, the Romans designed it to be horrendous for the person undergoing it as well as a graphic warning to the public to fall in line, lest the same fate await them. But “sexual violence?” That doesn’t even make sense.
The Cain and Abel story isn’t graphic. The verse describing Abel’s murder, Genesis 4:8, merely reads, “Cain spoke to Abel his brother. And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him.” The Bible doesn’t say how Cain killed his brother, and there’s no description of the scene of the crime.
The Bible is full of violent and sexually charged stories, and the point of them is to show how fallen humanity is and how all of us need the redemption that Jesus provided through his death, burial, and resurrection.
Noah’s drunken nudity after the flood showed how even the examples of faith can debase themselves. The men of Sodom and Gomorrah followed their basest desires. The book of Judges is full of stories of what resulted when “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” I dare you to read Ezekiel 23 for a graphic metaphor for Israel’s unfaithfulness toward the Lord.
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It still doesn’t make sense for Sheffield to slap a trigger warning on God’s Word, although the university has made a practice of it in the past.
“The university has defended its actions, calling the warning a ‘standard academic tool’ and insisting it is simply ‘preparing students who might find such [graphic] details difficult,’” reports Harbinger’s Daily. “Though many academic institutions have God-honoring roots, universities have come under intense scrutiny for vigorously pushing students toward an anti-Biblical worldview.”
Critics are calling out the University of Sheffield, and rightly so.
“Applying trigger warnings to salvation narratives that have shaped our civilisation is not only misguided, but absurd,” said Andrea Williams, chief executive of Christian Concern. “To suggest that the crucifixion story involves ‘sexual violence’ is not just inaccurate, it’s a profound misreading of the text. The account of Jesus’s death is not a tale of trauma, it is the ultimate expression of love, sacrifice, and redemption, central to the Christian faith.”
“Neither the Gospels nor Genesis give explicit accounts of Abel’s murder or Jesus’ crucifixion, and what the ‘sexual violence’ label refers to is mystifying,” said Angus Saul, the Christian Institute’s Head of Communications.
In a lengthy post on X, Jim Chimirie writes:
This is not care. It is cowardice institutionalised. And it reveals a deeper truth: we are not protecting young people from the Bible – we are protecting them from the demands it places upon them.
We are told this is about “sensitivity” and “student safety.” But the Gospel does not exist to spare our feelings. It exists to confront human brutality and to show that love is stronger than death. If students cannot cope with Christ on the cross, then they cannot cope with the civilisation the cross built. When the foundational story of redemption is treated as dangerous, everything built upon it becomes unsafe by default.
This attempt to sanitise Scripture is not misjudged; it is calculated. The Bible does not flatter the human ego – it exposes it. It does not affirm every impulse – it judges them. It forces us to face the darkest truths: murder, betrayal, lust, cowardice, cruelty. But it refuses to leave us there. The brutality of the crucifixion is not an act of trauma – it is the moment evil is broken. Violence is not celebrated, but defeated. To hide that is to hide hope itself.
This university deemed the same stories that shaped Western civilization, inspired the abolition of slavery, and built hospitals and universities as potentially harmful. That says more about the modern reader than it does about the ancient text — and the truth that text contains.
When a university slaps a warning label on God’s Word, it tells us more about the culture than about Scripture. If students can’t handle the cross, they can’t handle the civilization it built.
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