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Moore to the Point
Newsletter
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Hello, fellow wayfarers. Why do church sexual abuse cover-ups almost always succeed? … How do you know when it’s time to leave, even when you feel an obligation to stay? … Plus, books … This is this week’s Moore to the Point.
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How
Church Sexual Abuse Cover-Ups Succeed
At some point in my journey, I had to make a decision to walk away from a tradition I had loved and served all my life. And as with the decisions many of us make, I would second-guess myself often. I would wake up in the night and think, Should I have stayed just a little bit longer? When I asked my wife that question, she would say, “You stayed way too long.”
I would find myself actually feeling ashamed, thinking that I had failed my Sunday school teachers, my youth group leaders, my students, my team. And I would try to look back and convince myself that I could have found some way to remain in the tribe.
My wife and my friends warned me: “Your fundamental flaw is nostalgia. You are going to see all of that with sentimentality and try to forget the reality
of it all. And we will be here to remind you of what you saw, of what you experienced—not so you will get bitter but so you will never go through that again.”
I believed them with my mind, though not always with my heart. But often in times like that, we see something that reminds us of all that we left behind, of why certain decisions had to be made. Sometimes we find ourselves wanting to be surprised—to rejoice at the prodigal fathers and mothers coming home. And when we aren’t surprised, the result is not a sense of vindication but a misting of tears, the breaking of an already-broken heart.
An institutional train wreck was in the news and all over social media this week. Sadly, that’s not unusual right now. I resolved not to write about it because most of you didn’t grow up in the same tribe that I did, and I know from your correspondence that many of you don’t understand why I stayed so long in it or why I’m nostalgic even now for the best parts of it. And I am mindful of Jesus’ words: “Remember Lot’s wife” (Luke 17:32).
That said, I think there are things that all of us—no matter our denominational or religious or political or cultural traditions—can learn from these days, about how it works when churches or other institutions seek to cover up abusive behavior or retaliate against whistleblowers. Some things differ from place to place, but some things remain the same, no matter the institution.
First, every successful cover-up depends on the ignorance and waning attention spans of people. Some church groups and denominations are set up to
ensure that the healthiest people are the least engaged. After all, any well-balanced person who sees, up close, what passes for “denominational politics” finds much of what goes on there as, at worst, disillusioning and faith-rattling and, at best, kind of pitiful.
Well-balanced people don’t really care what titles they have in a denominational apparatus, because they see not only that such doesn’t matter in the scope of eternity but also that it doesn’t matter to almost anyone outside the room. That’s why these healthier people have to be talked into “taking one for the team” by serving on committees or being elected to
positions. They have lives and ministries and other things to do. They do not want the drama of all the institutional gamesmanship—especially in institutions that are in steady decline as people embarrassed by all the conflict and craziness vote by finding the exit doors.
In such institutions, any cover-up (of anything) depends on the fact that the people most motivated to keep paying attention are those for whom a spotlight would be an existential threat. An institution can deflect any accountability by just lengthening the process—with the almost certain knowledge that most people will get bored by the story and move on to something
else. One minister I talked to said his mentor told him that some of the truest words in Scripture were “And it came to pass,” because, in short order, almost everything moves on.
Finding ways to use language to make it sound as though one is complying without actually doing so is a well-worn tactic. As Bill Clinton worded it in his “apology” to the nation about his 1998 sexual/perjury scandal, “While my answers were legally accurate, I did not volunteer information.” When an institution puts legal-sounding words around banal phrases saying that they will not comply, it doesn’t fool the lawyers. They know what’s happening.
But the institution hopes that most regular people will find it all too confusing and say, “Well, who’s to say who’s right and who’s wrong?”
And if an institution can find a way to delay accountability by some process—through a committee or by somehow saying “We’ve begun to do what you’ve asked us to do, but trust us; we’ll get there when we can”—they know that oftentimes people either will assume that there’s been compliance or will just move on to other things.
A second dynamic at work in various sorts of institutional cover-ups is that many of them count on co-opting or destroying those who can see or who have experienced what’s happening. Some people enjoy conflict and controversy—maybe especially so in an institution built around a founding story of a “great battle.” Such people, who long to find a grand purpose or meaning in their lives, can then reenact the battles of the past over and over, with an ever-narrowing and ever more ridiculous definition of who gets to be the “liberals” or “the Catholics” or whatever the enemy used to be.
What’s especially sad about this is that usually these people are conscripted to become the very thing they once fought against. If, for instance, an institution was once adrift, moving theologically leftward while those in charge used “double speak” (talking one way in the pulpit and another in the seminar room), we sometimes find that a generation later, the very people who objected to it are doing the same thing. Their about-face is not about whether the Virgin Birth happened or whether faith in Christ is necessary for salvation but about whether blatant racism demands repentance or whether rape and sexual assault—clearly condemned in the inspired and inerrant Word of God—are just part of a “liberal” #MeToo culture to which the church should not listen.
Just as some people in some traditions say, “Pay no attention to our theological heterodoxy, because if you do, the institution will be hurt,” in the fullness of time, people in other traditions can say, “Pay no attention to our set of theological heresies or our crimes or our cover-ups; otherwise, the institution will be hurt.” If we are in an institution where we have been taught literally since birth that our tradition is God’s best and only hope for reaching the world with the gospel of Jesus Christ, that argument often works.
And that can work in really confusing ways. A person who loves an institution—or the theology or history or ideals behind that institution—will often start mistrusting his or her own gut and intuition that say something is really wrong.
A friend in a very secular line of very different institutional work told me recently about being in meetings where obviously crazy things were proposed. She looked around, expecting shocked expressions from the people with
the same expertise and training that she has, and saw only calm, nodding faces. Afterward, she pulled a colleague into a room and said, “Now, wait. That was bonkers, right?” The colleague said, “Oh, totally.”
In any institution, we can start to think that the very fact that everything seems normalized means we—the ones seeing the craziness of it all—must be crazy.
And then there are the strategies when someone steps out of line and calls out what is happening. Successful institutional cover-ups almost always include the fact that the people who are suppressing the truth are willing to do things that everybody else is not—things they know most other people will ignore. Many of these things involve wearing down whistleblowers and dissenters until they leave. As Charlie Sykes pointed out, in reference to the retirement of Congressman Anthony Gonzales (R-Ohio), this requires the
“self-deportation” of those who just can’t take the threats and the intimidation anymore.
More than that, though, is the threat of exile. Like Sykes, David Frum wrote about the political arena recently, describing the “process of estrangement” that builds on
itself when people find that an institution they once loved is on what they believe to be the wrong side of a significant moral ideal:
I thought we believed X, says the dissident. You’re a bunch of hypocrites for now saying Y. You’re betraying everything I thought we believed.
No, reply the majority. We always deep down believed that Y was more important than X. We never before had to choose. Now we do. And if you choose X over Y, it’s you who are betraying us.
Frum writes that this is what economists call “revealed preference,” which he defines as “a choice between two competing alternatives that forces the chooser to discover her highest values,” often with the accompanying confusion of seeing “how radically [these] highest values differed from those of old allies and former comrades.”
Most institutions are built on a sense of belonging, and that’s especially true of religious institutions. And most people are
terrified of hearing from their tribe (especially their religious tribe) “I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!” Turns out, only one Person really has the authority to say that—and those people and institutions are not Him.
After a while, people learn that there’s belonging elsewhere, that there’s joy elsewhere, that they really don’t have to sacrifice their consciences or their minds or their souls to follow Christ and to belong to his people. But that is easier to know with the intellect than to feel in the limbic system—at least at the moment.
Abuse cover-ups often work. They work because people don’t care. Or because people don’t care for long enough. Or because the institution is willing to destroy the lives, reputations, and futures both of anyone who speaks of the abuse he or she experienced and of anyone who will stand with those who experienced abuse.
But the good news is that abuse cover-ups don’t
work long-term. Mind you, they work long enough to shred the lives of victims and whistleblowers and to shred the consciences of those holding the coats for the ones doing the retaliating and gaslighting. Yet they don’t work long-term in the scope of history, much less eternity.
Jesus told us, “There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the ear in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the roofs” (Luke 12:2–3).
Jesus said these words in the context of fear: Do not be intimidated by those who can harm you in the now (vv. 4–5). Do not be afraid that somehow God has forgotten you (vv. 6–7). Do not fear the opinions of other people about you (vv. 8–10). Do not fear the threat of exile (vv. 11–12). Jesus is alive. Jesus is aware. And he knows what to do when an institution turns against the vulnerable and claims that God does not see.
No cover-ups can outlast the eschaton. There is no attorney-client privilege at the judgment seat of Christ. That should prompt us—no matter what institution we serve, no matter how much we love it—to call it into the light, into accountability, into the protection of the vulnerable.
And if we can’t, we don’t try to conform the mission to the institution’s demands. We walk out into the mission—with tears in our eyes, shaking the dust off our feet, but with our consciences still intact.
Institutions know how to impede accountability. Sexual abuse cover-ups work. For a little while.
My First Christianity Today Editorial
Here’s an excerpt from the first editorial I’ve written for Christianity Today:
Years ago, historian Martin Marty spoke of the “Baptistification” of American religion—by
which he meant that the individualistic creedalism, the entrepreneurial drive, and the voluntary-society model of the church were so consistent with the American ethos that almost every Christian communion—regardless of polity or theology—was starting to reflect it. …
Increasingly, though, American democracy is starting to look more and more like a Baptist congregational business meeting. The theory of “the priesthood of the believer” and
of every voice counting is giving way to the darker reality of knife fights, splits between factions, the social Darwinism of the way the meanest and most aggressive people can dictate the terms of debate. Whether those fights are over the color of the carpet in the vestibule or how to end a global pandemic, the so-called elites are in constant fear over populist uprisings, and the populist uprisings are often themselves manipulated by those who hope to be elites.
Churches that once thought they could be protected from constant threats of polarization and bitterness by a polity of bishops or presbyteries now find that the same factors are at work,
including the fake controversies and threats of withholding money or walking away. Even the Pope sometimes seems to be at the mercy of a Vatican bureaucracy with the same dynamics as a deacon board in Andalusia, Alabama.
Read the whole thing here.
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Quote of the Moment
The daughter of a former German diplomat in Moscow was trying to explain to me why her father, who, as an enlightened modern man, had been extremely pro-Communist, had become an implacable anti-Communist. It was hard for her because, as an enlightened modern girl, she shared the Communist vision without being a
Communist. But she loved her father and the irrationality of his defection embarrassed her. “He was immensely pro-Soviet,” she said, “and then—you will laugh at me—but you must not laugh at my father—and then—one night—in Moscow—he heard screams. That’s all. Simply one night he heard screams.” …
She did not know at all that she had swept away the logic of the mind, the logic of history, the logic of politics, the myth of the 20th century, with five annihilating words: one night he heard screams.
—Whittaker Chambers, Witness
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Onward,
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