RALEIGH, N.C. — On the Sunday after she was attacked, Marcia Mount Shoop went to church. The descendant of three generations of ministers, she knew of few more familiar and reassuring places. The Presbyterian Church of Danville, Ky., was the congregation in her hometown, where just about everybody recognized her as the daughter of two college professors, a star miler on the high school track team.

Standing amid the faithful on that morning in 1984, just 15 years old, Ms. Shoop felt her thoughts returning to that night — the pressure of the boy’s body on top of her, her voice pleading with him to stop, the sight of her blood-drenched underwear after she ran home through the dark.

Church brought no relief. It made everything worse. Church, at least in the wake of tragedy, was the empty predictability of confession recited in unison, hymns sung by rote, sermons about the glorious soul and the sinful body and magical forgiveness. A favorite verse from Romans in her copy of the Good News Bible now sounded like a lie: “We know that in all things God works for good with those who love him.”

Only at home, alone with the secret of her rape, could Ms. Shoop find something to grasp for survival. “I felt Jesus so close,” she recalled in a recent interview. “It wasn’t the same Jesus I saw at church. It was this tiny, audible whisper that said, ‘I know what happened. I understand.’ And it kept me alive, that frayed little thread.”