There’s adding insult to injury and then there’s what happened to a sixteen-year-old girl in Bangladesh. Last April, she was raped by a man whom, according to her family, had previously been harassing her.

Fear of shame and being ostracized kept the young woman from reporting the rape. Her family unknowingly married her off to a man from a neighboring village. The marriage only lasted a month because, as it turned out, she was pregnant with the rapist’s child.

If you’re thinking that things couldn’t get much worse for the poor girl, think again. In mid-January, village arbitrators sentenced her to 101 lashes for her “sins,” and fined her father the equivalent of $160, what the average Bangladeshi makes in three months. An additional fatwa stipulated that the family was to be ostracized until the fine is paid.

That same day, the sentence was carried out. According to the Pakistani paper Sindh Today, “at one stage of the torture, the girl collapsed and fainted. She regained consciousness after two hours.”

The accused rapist? The arbitrators who sentenced the girl to 101 lashes declined jurisdiction because he was from another village.

The case has become a cause célèbre for human rights activists in Bangladesh. They have launched an investigation and pledged to “help the victim file separate cases against the culprits.”

What Sindh Today called the girl’s “Triple Hurt” has drawn attention outside of Bangladesh, as well. It has understandably reinforced the misgivings – to put it mildly – that many of us in the West have about Islam and the kind of societies it produces.

In the U.K. Spectator, Rob Liddle pointed out that Bangladesh and nearby Malaysia are “often held up” as “modern progressive” Islamic states where “the usual savageries do not hold sway.” Yet in the former, a raped victim is whipped and in the latter “try, if you are a Christian, uttering the word ‘Allah’, meaning the Christian God, and count the seconds before your house is firebombed.”

For Liddle, it is difficult to “escape the conclusion that the most repulsive invasions of human rights that we see in the world today take place in countries where the national ideology is devolved from Islam.”

Speaking with a representative from the Muslim Council of Britain didn’t help matters. The representative called what happened in Bangladesh a “monstrous interpretation” of Islamic law regarding sex outside of marriage. At the same time, he conceded that it was “an attempted interpretation of Islam.” This led Liddle to conclude that “the inspiration for the lashing of that abused child was drawn from [Islam], even if it was an inspiration based on a misapprehension.”

I’m not so sure. Not because I buy into the whole “Islam is a religion of peace” folderol or because I don’t think that being a Muslim had a great deal to do with her “triple hurt” but because I don’t know what the rules are for holding an entire religion accountable for the “crimes committed in its name,” as the Spectator put it. These kind of statements raise more questions than they answer.

For instance, what is meant by “Islam?” A word broad enough to include the Sufis with the Salafists, Deobandis, and the latter two’s murderous progeny isn’t only unhelpful, it’s perverse and unjust. The latter two define themselves, in significant part, over against the practices of the Sufis. Their theological raison d’être is ridding the faith of the innovations, such as veneration of saints, introduced by the Sufis. For them, what makes the likes of Lal Qalander and his devotees “un-Islamic” was their openness to other religions such as Christianity and Hinduism. When you read about the Taliban banning music, more often than not the music being banned isn’t Lady Gaga or Taylor Swift but Qawwali, the devotional music of Sufism.

As one Pakistani Sufi told journalist Nicholas Schmidle, authoritarian clerics have “always been at war with Sufis.” Even if you doubt that “Sufis represent the strongest indigenous force against fundamentalist Islam,” holding them accountable for the acts of their would-be victimizers is unfair.

Another question is the line between cult and culture. Muslim apologists (as in apologetics) insist that atrocities like whipping rape victims or “honor killings” are often the product of pre-Islamic cultural practices that have been given an Islamic gloss. While that strikes me as a bit too convenient, it’s clear (or should be) that the atrocity in Bangladesh wasn’t only rooted in Islam. After all, the vast majority of Muslim societies do not whip rape victims and non-Muslim societies have been known to “blame the victim” in cases of rape, albeit in less barbaric ways.

Religion isn’t practiced in a vacuum: what we observe and comment on is the product of the interaction between a set of beliefs and the people who embrace those beliefs, especially in the case of proselytizing religions like Islam or Christianity. The cult shapes the culture but the reverse is also true.

Then there’s the question of who speaks for Islam or any other religion for that matter. Sunni Islam, which comprises 85 percent of the world’s Muslims, is famously non-hierarchical. It has no bishops or even clergy as westerners understand that term. Any Sunni who has been trained in Islamic jurisprudence – however you define “trained” – can issue a fatwa and every other Sunni is free to ignore it unless they agree to be bound by its contents.

(I use the word “agree” loosely: the fatwas that victimized the Bangladeshi girl and her family were binding because the village arbitrators had the power to make them binding.)

If it seems that I’m bending over backwards to “absolve Islam for the crimes committed in its name,” I’m not doing it for Islam – I’m doing it for Christianity.

In A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More tells his son-in-law that “I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.” Same thing here: I want to be clear what the rules are for Islam because I want them to be clear when speaking about Christianity.

After all, Christianity is, if anything, even more diverse than Islam. “Christian” can refer to Trappists in Belgium, Pentecostals in Brazilian favelas, Chinese attending house churches, monks on Mt. Athos, Presbyterians in Tennessee and countless other varieties.

All this diversity makes the relationship between cult and culture even more important when talking about Christianity. Hilaire Belloc once said that “The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith.” The latter was never true and given Europe’s sanguinary history (not to mention the things done to indigenous peoples by Europeans and their descendants acting with the supposed sanction of the Christian God), I’m not crazy about the first part, either. At the very least, I’d like the option to distance the faith once delivered to the saints from the things done by those who profess it on the behalf of societies who claim to have been shaped by it.

And of course determining who speaks for Christianity, with one notable exception, is every bit as daunting as figuring out who speaks for Islam. And, if anything, it’s going to even more daunting: the fastest-growing branch of Christianity is the decidedly non-hierarchical and undeniably subjective Pentecostalism.

It’s not that I expect Pentecostals, or any other Christians, to do anything that can remotely be compared to what happened in Bangladesh, although recent events in Uganda have shaken my confidence on that score – it’s that every time someone says something stupid or, God forbid, if someone does something atrocious in the name of my God, I don’t want to be lumped in with the perpetrators or judged by whether I condemn something that I regard as a monstrous interpretation of my faith to the satisfaction of someone who already holds my faith in suspicion or even contempt.

If Sir Thomas More could, for the sake of his safety, give the Devil himself the benefit of the law, I am more than willing to give ordinary Muslims the benefit of the doubt. Not only for their sake but for mine.

For more insight into this topic, get the book, The Complete Guide to Christian Denominations, by Ron Rhodes. Or read the article, “Judge Not” by Jean Bethke Elshtain.