#ChurchToo

June 7, 2018 3:22 PM

The fact that there are abusive leaders in the evangelical church is utterly, unremarkably unsurprising. Where there are men in power, there will be men abusing it. What separates #ChurchToo from #MeToo are the power dynamics (at the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality) entrenched in evangelical purity culture, a sex-obsessed, white Christian moralism.

Emily Joy tweeted out her #ChurchToo story a full decade after the alleged abuse had ended... Joy went to sleep expecting a retweet or two, maybe some engagement from a few acquaintances in her feed. She woke to thousands of tweets, close friends, and complete strangers all telling their own stories of sexual harassment and abuse in and around evangelical institutions under the tag #ChurchToo. Over the next 48 hours, the hashtag reverberated across evangelical Twitter.

posted by narancia (31 comments total)

“The white evangelical church would cease to exist as we know it if it started to seriously address these issues. The entire power pyramid would topple; the church is based on that hierarchy.”

Oh, my heavens, yes. Without the White Patriarchy, there would be literally nothing left. I mean, the image of the Patriarchy descends, inexorably, from the Patriarchs.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:42 PM on June 7, 2018 [14 favorites]

The white evangelical church would cease to exist as we know it if it started to seriously address these issues. The entire power pyramid would topple; the church is based on that hierarchy.”


“Let justice be done, though the heavens fall” seems like the appropriate quote.
posted by nubs at 3:49 PM on June 7, 2018 [34 favorites]

"He must increase, and I must decrease," is in some ways the most fearful and beautiful line in the Scriptures. In the Church we are called to be continually in the act of ripping ourselves down to the studs to root out the dross, and when we fail at that, we're not doing it right. Our failures are so many. I have my own stories to tell from the evangelical church, which I spent way too many years in and have a lot of scars from. I hope and pray that things get better, but it will be for someone else, not me again.
posted by backwards compatible at 4:07 PM on June 7, 2018 [9 favorites]

I am very interested in this subject, and look forward to a deeper dive than Jezebel can handle on theological issues that might be increasing this.
posted by corb at 4:18 PM on June 7, 2018 [4 favorites]

Maybe it's because women in power are so rare in evangelical churches or for some other reason, but the worst they are doing is complying with the demands of the abusers that they remain silent. Which is easy to enforce when their husbands are all about the power of being head of the household while rejecting any of the responsibility that comes from that status.

Even in individual churches where physical abuse isn't the norm, emotional abuse surely is. It's a sick system that has only gotten worse as both their fervor and political involvement has increased. It's a structure that is essentially designed to minimize women's power and the chance that abuse will be discovered, disclosed, or punished. Many of the strongest social norms in that culture serve that end more than any other, almost as if it were designed that way.
posted by wierdo at 4:31 PM on June 7, 2018 [8 favorites]

Just want to take the opportunity to signal boost Libby Anne's blog Love, Joy, Feminism. That's her latest post, which talks about this too.

(For background, she was raised in the creepy evangelical homeschool world, and got loose of it as an adult. She writes a lot about the abuses that occur there, and I've found reading her work to be pretty eye-opening.)

Also:
just pointing out that no, "better religion" is not the core solution - destroying patriarchy is.

This really can't be emphasized enough.
posted by mordax at 4:49 PM on June 7, 2018 [24 favorites]

Mod note: Deleted a few comments. Let’s not immediately shift the subject here. Thanks.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 4:57 PM on June 7, 2018 [3 favorites]

Meanwhile, over at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary... Southern Baptist leader told alleged victim it was 'good' she was raped, lawyer says. That's a headline from a few days ago, and events from a couple of years ago. Ugly stuff.

Especially in context of this, from the linked article: "According to Joy, “In some circles, ‘consent’ is considered a dirty word. It implies agency and autonomy, and a fundamental teaching of Christian purity culture is that your body does not belong to you.”"
posted by MonkeyToes at 7:10 PM on June 7, 2018 [19 favorites]

I'm really glad about the #ChurchToo movement. What I've read focuses on evangelical Christianity, and it's so important to shine a light on those churches, but it's crucial to note that liberal religious spaces have this problem as well. Unitarian Universalist congregations have struggled with sexual misconduct, and earlier this year the founder of the Buddhist Dharma Punx movement, Noah Levine, was investigated for sexual misconduct as well.

The UU article I linked is from 2014 - which is about when I was attending a UU church where a minister was charged with sexual harassment by multiple congregants. Although the minister was found to have acted inappropriately (and admitted this), the people who came forward were ostracized and the minister remained employed at the church. Needless to say I stopped attending.

I just visited the website of that UU church I mentioned, to see if given #MeToo and the congregation's history, they had created a code of conduct or some other explicit policy against harassment.

Nothing, zilch, nada. There was lots of wording about "all are welcome here" and no mention of sexual harassment, no code of conduct, no policies defining appropriate and inappropriate relationships between ministers and congregants (or between congregants and other congregants).

Made me sad that liberal spaces can present themselves as kinder and safer alternatives to Evangelical Christianity but fail to protect the very individuals they seek out.
posted by rogerrogerwhatsyourrvectorvicto at 8:00 PM on June 7, 2018 [20 favorites]

I have so many deep scars and lingering psychological issues that will never really resolve from years of various types of abuse in the evangelical church, and I’m a white cis dude. I knew many women who experienced different sorts of traumas growing up. The experience shaped me in mostly negative ways and has forever made me very disdainful of any type of religion.

If you’re reading this and need support, the Ex-Evangelical group on Facebook is generally a nice place. You can also reach out personally.
posted by Lutoslawski at 1:53 AM on June 8, 2018 [7 favorites]

> white evangelical church

I don't think this is a well defined term here, unless it's trying to say there is something about all white evangelical churches that is essential. Maybe if you just want to talk about white churches talk about that, but, off the top of my head, when people say white evangelical they conflate:

- Prosperity gospel megachurches
- Post explo '72 evangelical wave counter-counterculture-alists
- left / liberal evangelical churches that grew out of the schisms of the various denominations
- their right / conservative counterparts

The fundamentalist evangelicals (the conservative ones) are united, such as they are, around marriage being one man and one woman, pro life issues, sex before marriage being a sin.

Fundamentalist evangelical branches of some denominations restrict female clergy and power within their churches because they believe the bible as it is constituted now is the literal word of God and that there are restrictions on women being in power within the church, and, if you're going by the literal interpretation thing, they aren't wrong.

And if the evangelical church is unable or unwilling to see that the image of God is black, brown, queer, poor, and assaulted, the evangelical church will continue to sanction, even to mandate violence.


This is - I don't know - a misreading of what these people believe again? The evangelical church, and all churches, see man as made in the image of God. They also believe that all have sinned, and that those who continue in sin cannot receive salvation (or maybe they can, if you're a Calvinist and they are elect). White evangelicals don't deny god in black, brown, queer, poor, or assaulted people. On the contrary! There are tens of thousands of missionaries from hundreds of denominations all over the world from these same evangelicals - and they are all trying to sell you on their brand of christianity. Perhaps there is a lack of respect or understanding for those not white or christian, but they don't lack for a desire to convert / love these people after conversion. They do deny / have contempt for / lack sympathy for those they perceive as sinners.

I wish this article went further but it seems to hold itself back from the final diagnosis. Its would be nice to say that its the white christian fundamentalist parts of this that are somehow the essential bad bits of christianity, but the queer and black christians in the article are just as culpable. They are still supporting organized religion by publicly identifying as christian, and are therefore contributing to oppression and division by claiming that title. I don't think you can honestly make this kind of critique and not tear down the church completely. Its malignancy is not because of this specific white American conservative fundamentalist evangelical version, but because of christianity's theological foundation (sin / separation / atonement / divinity).
posted by durandal at 4:19 AM on June 8, 2018 [4 favorites]

The Washington Post had a recent article about this, with an illustration that looks more Catholic/Episcopal than evangelical. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/05/31/feature/the-epidemic-of-denial-about-sexual-abuse-in-the-evangelical-church/?utm_term=.487078dd37d0
posted by MichelleinMD at 6:35 AM on June 8, 2018

The fundamentalists do not deny that man is made in the image of God, or that there is God in everyone.

I agree that many fundamentalists view queer people as sinners (though not intrinsically; it's only the 'practice' that is the sin). I should have been more explicit: they have contempt for those who they perceive sinners, aka those who sin despite knowing about what it mean to be a christian / what christianity is.
posted by durandal at 7:08 AM on June 8, 2018

Some strains of Evangelical Christianity are extraordinarily flexible in swinging between "Everybody sins, that means we're all in the same boat, we need to have compassion and empathy and forgiveness for each other" and "If you sin you're a bad person." That flexibility works as a get-out-of-jail-free card for your friends - or people who you perceive as being "on your team" - but also a get-out-of-jail-free card for being really judgmental of everybody else.

Sometimes this manifests as sexual sins being Really Bad sins and other sins being kind of "eh," but look at Donald Trump - because (some) Evangelicals perceive him as on their team (for reasons I still can't comprehend - we can agree the guy is as biblically illiterate as he is actually illiterate, right?), he gets basically infinite forgiveness for having affairs, trading his wives in for younger models, etc.

And this - I think - actually has a lot to do with #ChurchToo; because if you're a woman, and a victim, you know there's a better-than-even chance that your abuser gets tagged with "Well, everybody sins, everybody deserves forgiveness" and you get tagged with "You're a sinner, you brought this on yourself." Especially since purity-culture policing of dress and behavior, etc, is often super arbitrary: you don't necessarily even know what the rules are until somebody's all "What do you expect to happen if you're tempting boys by sitting cross-legged on the floor?"
posted by Jeanne at 7:33 AM on June 8, 2018 [17 favorites]

durandal, you seem to be focusing on what people say they believe, rather than what they actually do in the world. Even I am familiar with the relevant bit of scripture on that.
posted by schadenfrau at 7:43 AM on June 8, 2018 [11 favorites]

I am also not sure who you think you’re explaining religion to. The article is written by a woman with more than adequate knowledge of American white evangelical Christianity, both in theory and in practice. The post is about the many ways the culture of white American evangelicalism is designed to support abuse, and people have already chimed in with their own experiences. Maybe you should engage with the actual experiences described in this thread rather than lecture.
posted by schadenfrau at 7:47 AM on June 8, 2018 [7 favorites]

> I am also not sure who you think you’re explaining religion to. The article is written by a woman with more than adequate knowledge of American white evangelical Christianity, both in theory and in practice. The post is about the many ways the culture of white American evangelicalism is designed to support abuse, and people have already chimed in with their own experiences. Maybe you should engage with the actual experiences described in this thread rather than lecture.


I am explaining it from my lived experience of it, growing up with it, studying it and it's origins, and believing it a long time ago. I disagree with the author, as I think I'm trying to put forth here. I am trying to respectfully disagree with the premise of the article, namely:

The fact that there are abusive leaders in the evangelical church is utterly, unremarkably unsurprising. Where there are men in power, there will be men abusing it. What separates #ChurchToo from #MeToo are the power dynamics (at the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality) entrenched in evangelical purity culture, a sex-obsessed, white Christian moralism. #ChurchToo, like #MeToo, is concerned with calling out abusers and culling them from positions of power. It also echoes #MeToo in what it asks of society (and, respectively, the evangelical church) as a whole. Namely, How exactly did we get here? and How exactly do we address this?


I agree with the first two sentences of the above, but disagree with the conclusions reached throughout the article about there being something essential about the whiteness or evangelicalness of this abuse, or that what is wrong with white evangelical christianity is the white or the evangelical part. I don't think the author makes their case. And I disagree on how we got here, and I disagree on how exactly do we address this.

As to engaging with the shared experiences of others in this thread: I also found growing up a fundamentalist to be an emotionally damaging and abusive experience.
posted by durandal at 8:21 AM on June 8, 2018

> And if the evangelical church is unable or unwilling to see that the image of God is black, brown, queer, poor, and assaulted, the evangelical church will continue to sanction, even to mandate violence.

This is - I don't know - a misreading of what these people believe again? The evangelical church, and all churches, see man as made in the image of God.

What happened during slavery, then? Checking off these doctrinal points from a list as notions evangelical Christians supposedly idolize does not have the corollaries you seems to think it does, and does not necessitate actually having regard for others and valuing them and their lives equally, any more than the United States as a polity checking off a bunch of noble-sounding principles about freedom and liberty did.
posted by XMLicious at 9:03 AM on June 8, 2018 [3 favorites]

The point of the white evangelical characterisation is that Christianity in the US takes forms—cultural forms, particularly around race—that are not found elsewhere in the Christian world, because of American history. The need to find and defend a Biblical justification for slavery has done things to American Christianity that sets it apart from, for example, evangelical Christianity in Wales. This doesn’t mean that Welsh Methodists don’t have their own problems and peculiarities but this form of American Christianity is white—is built on a hidden and complex theology of race—in a way that other traditions just aren’t, because of that history. For example, if you look at John Paul II’s theology of the body and his account of sexual ethics within the Catholic tradition—problematic as aspects of it might be—it doesn’t have all that much in common with the preserving-the-race-from-contamination undertone that infects these specific US traditions and which the article is rightly focusing on.
posted by Aravis76 at 9:34 AM on June 8, 2018 [7 favorites]

durandal, you seem to be focusing on what people say they believe, rather than what they actually do in the world.

I just wanted to back this up extra, since this discussion is ongoing: what people have to say is great and all, but how they behave is much more important when figuring out what really motivates people. If a person says one thing and does another, I believe the action.

Disclaimer: I'm only all that familiar with how this works in the US. But here? The idea that white evangelicals 'see God in POC' is laughable, given stuff like this:

MSNBC
Splinter link showing views on immigration

That particular subgroup is more behind Donald 'build a wall' Trump than any other group. They don't want us here: not brown people, not black, none of us, and that is very much about white supremacy.

I'd also note their beliefs have a shocking malleability when they're faced with a loss of prestige. The history of their positions on abortion is positively 1984. Here's a glance at some of it. Their view of abortion - now an absolute, unswerving tentpole - did a complete 180 within the lifetime of many posters on this very forum.

So I don't care what they pay lip service to, and I would advise everybody else to look at it pretty carefully.
posted by mordax at 9:38 AM on June 8, 2018 [15 favorites]

Also, talking race here is a little deraily, so to refocus it back where the thread belongs, here's some more recommended reading:

Some discussion of the Southern Baptist Convention official position on women

This also gets at the whole 'talk versus walk' thing pretty well, I think.
posted by mordax at 9:46 AM on June 8, 2018 [4 favorites]

With respect, the OP article is covering things like slavery, the racist attitudes of white evangelical women towards black evangelical women including a personal statement from a college student to that effect, and proposals to eliminate the discussion of white privilege from Christian discourse. Plus the author identifies herself as a member of the Lumbee. Discussion of race in this thread is not a derail.
posted by XMLicious at 11:07 AM on June 8, 2018 [4 favorites]

The point is well made in the article — while this is coming to light because of the sexual abuses of men, “all oppressions are tied together” in this particular culture, at least, like some awful rat king of human terribleness / white male supremacy.
posted by schadenfrau at 11:12 AM on June 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

I don't think talking about race here derails, since it's my point that it's not race or denomination but the religion itself that is the source of the #churchtoo problems. I agree with Aravis, white Christianity in the US has a long history that should be considered. And I agree with XMLicious, historically Christianity in the US has been wielded as a tool to oppress people. And I agree, modern evangelicals are pretty racists as a group. I also think that they sincerely believe that man is made in the image of God. These are incongruous beliefs but they are the beliefs they hold. I disagree that you can say that the #churchtoo abuse or this type of pattern of abuse is unique or has unique features to white Evangelical Christianity, I disagree that the article invites the 'good' christians on to defend Christianity as long as it's not white or Evangelical. There is no good Christianity, and abuse perpetrated by people in power is not tied in a significant way to whiteness or Evangelicalness, but power. That's my real point. I'm out.
posted by durandal at 1:07 PM on June 8, 2018

abuse perpetrated by people in power is not tied in a significant way to whiteness or Evangelicalness, but power.

Abuse perpetrated by people in power is indeed tied to power (not to race as a fact in itself, divorced from its social meaning, or to anyone's theological beliefs about the atonement, divorced from the social meaning of those beliefs). Whiteness is linked to power in the US. So is a certain strain of Protestantism. You seemed to be making the argument that it's not the social power held by white male Protestants in US history that explains abuse in their ranks but instead something to do with the theology of Christianity itself. I'm biased by my own Christianity, of course, but even dispassionately I think that is a hard claim to defend. I find it very implausible to believe that Marilynne Robinson's Calvinism, in and of itself and apart from her participation in any social hierarchy, makes her more likely to be abusive or to defend abuse. It is all about power, which means--among other things--that it isn't especially about theology. (See also abusive Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, and atheists).
posted by Aravis76 at 1:35 PM on June 8, 2018 [2 favorites]

Fred Clark on the evangelical shift from pro-choice to anti-choice.
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:45 PM on June 8, 2018 [3 favorites]

I am very interested in this subject, and look forward to a deeper dive than Jezebel can handle on theological issues that might be increasing this.

Thanks! Your dismissive comment convinced me to actually read the link.
posted by wreckingball at 3:43 PM on June 8, 2018 [6 favorites]

I was raised in a white evangelical church, and even that long ago sexually predatory pastors were sometimes "outed" (I hate to use a queer term for this, but can't think of a better one) and lost their jobs. The Catholic church began its deserved reckoning earlier in part because everybody has a boss. In the nonhierarchical American churches, the buck passes to the end in one or two steps, and if a bad actor doesn't end up in the paper, there's no institutional knowledge to either protect him or throw him out. It's different in the discourse between being about Catholic and US-Evangelical scandals: the Catholics have a reputation for going after prepubescent boys and the latter (at least in my area) for going after high school girls. Though all sins be equal in the eyes of the Lord, there is a repugnance gap there in the public eye.

(No, I'm no longer religious.)

By the way, the ladder-climbing as a professional evangelical religious dude starts with being a youth pastor. (In title or non.) You don't even have to be in church school yet. I imagine that might be appealing to a certain sort: "Hey, do you want to be a cool, admired authority figure? You may be in charge of the high schoolers immediately. Here's the keys." (I'm exaggerating only slightly: a good friend of mine volunteered at a church to work with children recently, and they just told her to show up. She asked, "aren't you going to give me a background check?"
posted by Sterros at 8:16 PM on June 8, 2018 [2 favorites]

With respect, the OP article is covering things like slavery, the racist attitudes of white evangelical women towards black evangelical women including a personal statement from a college student to that effect, and proposals to eliminate the discussion of white privilege from Christian discourse. Plus the author identifies herself as a member of the Lumbee. Discussion of race in this thread is not a derail.

Pardon, I was trying super hard not to yell at durandal for their horrifying comments, and overcompensated at the end there. Please, carry on.
posted by mordax at 12:46 AM on June 9, 2018 [3 favorites]

sexually predatory pastors were sometimes "outed" (I hate to use a queer term for this, but can't think of a better one)

How about "exposed"?
posted by Pope Guilty at 5:40 AM on June 9, 2018 [6 favorites]

I am explaining it from my lived experience of it, growing up with it, studying it and it's origins, and believing it a long time ago.

durandal, I grew up in it, studied it and believed it for a while and I thought the article's descriptions and definitions were very close to my lived experience of it. The intersection of racism/sexism/homophobia that played out right in front of my eyes for years in multiple white evangelical spaces is pretty well-described by the article, I thought. That evangelicals pay lip-service to the idea of loving all humans while "hating the sin" is just part of the racist/sexist/homophbic mechanism.
posted by eustacescrubb at 7:05 AM on June 9, 2018 [2 favorites]