Paedophiles, Sexual Predators and Other Conmen[1]
– How Evil People Exploit the Church
1. The Other Martyrs of the Christian Church
Victims of Christian Predators
A youth leader takes compromising photos of boys in a youth
group and uses the pictures to manipulate them into sexual relations with him.
A choir girl commits suicide over the condemnation she receives from the
congregation over the “affair” she had with the charismatic minister. Numerous
accusations of serial adultery on the part of a senior pastor of a high-profile
student-movement church are swept under the rug by the leadership. Paedophile
priests institutionalise abuse in the Catholic church. Southern Baptist
preachers sexually abuse hundreds. High profile TV personality church leaders
fraudulently move millions of Rands over borders. An armed robbery gang runs a
church that shields them and they launder their loot through the collection
system. An elderly printer remembers the hushed horror of the beatings he
received as an orphan in a church orphanage. Another orphanage struggles to
account for the money donated to it apparently disappearing through a
mysterious network of trust funds…
Profoundly embarrassing as all this is to a Christian
movement that is supposed to be built on love and integrity, that is not the
issue.
The issue is that thousands upon thousands of vulnerable
people, mostly women and children, have been traumatised and damaged for life.
Their capacity for faith in God has been shredded by the actions of God’s people
in leadership, and the reinforced traumatisation of the vilification and blame
they have received if and when abuses were uncovered. Victims routinely get
abandoned. A well-known pastor receives tender care, at great expense, in his
rehabilitation. The victims of his sexual predation are ignored – their only
redress is civil litigation, if they have the emotional strength and resources
to go to the lawyers. They are highly unlikely to get any consideration from
the formal church.
These victims are martyrs. They were sacrificed in the name
of God by Christian leaders on the altars of greed, power and lust. Why are
Christians so passive about this unholy subversion of their institutions? And
what can we do to guard ourselves from being exploited by these conscienceless
predators? Or is what the atheists say
true – does our system of faith breed such corruption by its very nature?
On behalf of the little ones who have been robbed and broken
and burned and thrown aside by the church, I would like to plead with
Christians to consider this unappetising issue.
I spend quite a lot of time amongst people who are estranged
from the church, and I hear and witness many terrible stories of abuse and utter
disillusionment and desolation.
Friendly Fire
Meanness and apathy have been the thorns that have strangled
many sprouting faiths. Toxic masculinity has broken the will of many gifted
women to serve and lead. Hostile doctrinaire attacks and legalistic punishments
of diversity have also choked their fair share of life out of the vulnerable.
Strong people with strong opinions have been breathtakingly unloving in
Christian communities, and feel virtuous about having “maintained the truth”.
Ministers have preached condemnation. Intercessors have had conversations with
God in which they have eloquently excluded sinners from a saving relationship
with him. People have withered and their faith has died under the searing gaze
of disapproval and the barrage of hate-filled resentment of their differing
from settled cultural congregational norms of dress and sexuality and opinion.
Those who were supposed to have been their friends have attacked the weak and
vulnerable and hurt them too badly for them to continue to follow after God. At
least, not in that company. Do you think church is a nice place? Think again. It
might be lovely for you. But so many people tell church horror stories.
Betrayal
The horror stretches way beyond social hazing and cultural unkindness,
of course. That low-grade meanness is a background to really great
institutional atrocities that we are beginning to see spelled out in the media.
·
Private spiritual coaching has morphed into
sexual predation.
·
Talk of tithes and offerings has manipulated
people to give more than they could afford.
·
Friendly companionship has brought pressure to
bear on people to compromise their values and join in the vilification of
others under the cloak of obedience to doctrinal instruction.
·
People have been forced to carry secret burdens
of guilt by those hiding their own secret guilt.
·
High profile leaders have turned out to have
been hiding seriously perverted personal agendas under the most
elevated-sounding spiritual speech in their sermons, seminars and published
works.
Once again, there is a toll – many have been frightened away
from a faith that promises safety to the vulnerable, but then seems to
accumulate so many dangerous acolytes.
Predation
This is the corrupt, oozing heart of the problem: priests
and pastors grooming children for sexual exploitation, silencing them with the
terrible sanction of not being believed were they to impugn such a powerful
leader. Women have been recruited into perverse spiritual harems for
unscrupulous leaders. Charismatic leaders have stolen and robbed and raped and
lied and cheated and hidden their obscene predilections under the smug mantle
of respectability and the flaming mantle of spirituality. And who is speaking
for the victims/survivors here? It is the discarded, broken and ignored who pay
the price for the corruption of the church, not the church as a whole, and
certainly not the religious predators.
So why has the church been such a haven for predators? I
think there are several contributing factors, and several processes and
structures to consider as we consider keeping the vulnerable safe from these
monstrous abusers going foreward.[2]
2. I would Never Do That – why Christian Communities are Vulnerable
to Hosting Predators.
A doting mother acts as if her unpleasantly criminal son is
a “lovely boy”. Christian communities seem to react in the same way to their
own evil leaders. Whether these are home-grown cultural insiders gone bad, or
malevolent cuckoos fraudulently foisted on unsuspecting communities, the effect
is the same. Non-predators protect, protect and protect, way beyond the place
of reasonable doubt.
Naively nice: 1 Corinthians 13 and likeable Christians.
1 Corinthians 13 is terribly prone to being manipulated into
a rationale for hosting evil leadership. The requirement to attribute the best
motives to others, to think kindly of their motivations and to patiently put up
with being hurt leaves wriggle room for the evil maggot to bore into the life
of the church and hatch into full evil. Little warning signs are read as
forgivable peccadilloes, mere skeletonyanas that are understandable and
innocuous. Next thing the vulnerable choir-boy is being raped every week after
choir practice.
We want to be kind and nice. We also want to be important,
and made to feel good about ourselves by the powerful. So, we tend to be nice and
kind and respectful … to our leader – we support and encourage him. At the very
most we sometimes mildly rebuke his occasional error of judgement. We perhaps
smile at the Youth Leader’s closeness to the children and admire the connection
the choir-master seems to have with the choir, and how he brings out the best
in them. But who is going to be nice and kind to the vulnerable choir boy?
Desperately un-nice and viciously unkind things are happening to this most
vulnerable member of our congregation. While we are foolishly preening
ourselves in mutual admiration of the predatory leader.
Are you really, really sure this is not currently happening
in your church?
It’s time for the Church to become less nice towards its
leaders.
Ethics and a Watching God
One thing that helps a sincerely believing Christian to not
abuse others in any way is the belief that God is watching over their lives,
and that they will have to give an account of how they used their gifts and how
lovingly they acted towards others. One of the results of my conversion is that
I live with the fact of the gaze of God…it’s not intimidating, but it helps me
in many ways to triangulate my actions and attitudes, knowing that there is
somebody involved in my life whom I can neither fool nor flatter. In a sense,
my ethics are way less admirable than those of an atheist. She does not steal
although she knows nobody can see her; I don’t steal because I know there’s
surveillance!
But since I believe this, it leaves me uniquely vulnerable
to manipulation. If I have a leader who says he too lives under the eye of God,
I tend to accept that he shares my sensitivities – in fact, I am happy to find
a like-minded pilgrim. It is an area which a conscienceless predator will
happily exploit. Talk is cheap[3].
Wide-open Welcome to Volunteers
And it is not only leaders we have to fear as Christians. My
conversion to faith in Christ has made me a super-volunteer. I am desperately
eager to do anything I can to further the cause of God. In fact, I have to be
counselled not to over-commit myself.
This leaves us vulnerable to the whiles of the predator in
another way – of course we assume that the young man volunteering to help with
the Sunday school shares our sense of responsibility. It is easy for him to
present himself as a keen follower of Jesus who is desperate for some or other
role in serving God and his people. And since there are many young people who
are genuinely motivated to serve God and others (although never enough of them
for the tasks at hand), the predator slips in with the rest. Once he is in, he
can flatter and manipulate himself into a position of power, and the next thing
children are being groomed for sexual predation, under the most effective of
camouflages – this new leader has a calling to serve the church and God’s
people.
Imagining utter evil – we can’t
I believe this is partly due to a failure of imagination.
Christians are gullible because they cannot imagine exactly how evil a predator
can be, and how easily it is to pretend to be a Christian. For a deeply
committed Christian, it is impossible to imagine being able to live with
oneself if one were to be carrying that level of deceit. A predator smiles and
builds his impunity behind a seamless mask of religious bullshit – Shakespeare
recognised this in Richard III. Nathan recognised this in David. Sadly, for
most of us it takes many humiliating disappointments to be able to imagine what
could go wrong in the church.
Blindfolded Theological Education
Perhaps we are at times dazzled by education. Struggling as
we are ourselves with trying to understand the complexities of the Bible and
the intricacies of obedience, we tend to kow-tow to the more knowledgeable; we
certainly reverence the more certain – the visiting preacher who has published
books, or the apostle who knows the very mind of God about the intimate details
of our future. Plus, we believe so easily that everybody is basically decent,
trying to live a good life to the best of their capacities… Leaders, as the
myth goes, are always well-intentioned guides to well-intentioned
congregations.
In this regard, we might acknowledge that technically “all
have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”, but we don’t really believe
it. If we did, we would be hyper-vigilant. We would pray the Lord’s Prayer with
a proper emphasis on “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”. We
would say to ourselves about the visiting expert: “so what does this sinner
have to say to us? How converted is he? Will he tell us any lies?” As it is, we
believe we are what one minister recently described to me as “decent people”.
And that includes our leaders, because it is unimaginable to us that decent,
spiritual people would not be able to spot bad egg through our interview
processes…
Well, a predator with a theological degree and a capacity to
speak with passion and clear-eyed sincerity about the things of God is also a
“decent person” …. except for his indecent secret life, and his conscience-free
corruption. Seminaries are not set up to scrutinise the small number of
ordinands fully– perhaps we need them too badly to place any extra pressure on
them, for fear of chasing some good ones away? And as I have said, we are too
nice and naïve to imagine that some of the most effective communicators have
not a single iota of decency or conscience. But experience teaches us that time
after time that has been the exact truth.
Bishops, Apostles and Military Commanders
Our Christian understanding of leadership is infinitely
vulnerable to being corrupted by our society’s understanding of leadership. We
constantly gravitate towards “having a king like all the other nations”. We
require somebody to both take the lead, to take the responsibility, and to take
the blame. We want someone who represents our interests in the corridors of
power, as a prime example of who we aspire to be as a cultural unit. You could
say we make or hire our leaders in our own image. We need somebody who can also
be our proxy in the dangerous realms of the spirit, and we want somebody to
lecture us about being what we think we should be. We aspire to be great, so we
want great leaders who display the trappings of greatness to which we want to
rise: the car and the clothes, the house and the lifestyle, the jet and the
conferences, the honour and the status.
We generally do not seem to want a servant leader who
empowers us to do and be simple followers of Jesus. In our minds that capacity
for simple and wholehearted discipleship is the leader’s job-description. And
this delegation of responsibility and blame makes for a situation that is ripe
for the master of disguises to step in and give us exactly what we want – but
at a price we are not aware we are going to have to pay – the price of the
disillusionment and destruction of the lives of our most vulnerable members.
Pride, Ego, and Psychic Investment
Our leaders express our identity. Since we are invested in
our identity, we are invested in our leader – because the unacknowledged
subtext is that the leader we have expresses how superior we are. We have a
shiny charismatic leader, not like the dowdy wannabe suburban churches around
us. The manipulative predator makes sure that he adds sparkle to our image.
On the flip side, we can’t imagine ourselves to have been
foolish enough to have employed a con-man, so the losses mount and mount as we
defend the indefensible. Subconsciously, perhaps, we desperately do not want to
be exposed as the foolish church committee who did not actually check the
glowing CV of the predator when he first came (true story). We do not want to
be responsible for overlooking the discrepancies on the quarterly spreadsheet
which would have stopped the administrator from taking her big slice of the
church income for so long (true story).
Predators know that nice Christians think this way. They
gleefully exploit our petty egos and snuggle down into a comfortable nest of
money, sex and power.
3. Seizing Control – Tactics of Evil
Predators like to minimise risk and maximise opportunity.
The most efficient way to do this is by manipulating an entire community into
allowing them to establish their lair at the heart of a respected institution –
the church, or the youth ministry, or the Sunday School, or the Choir…all of
them places where somebody can come to exercise unsupervised power in an
undisputed fiefdom, and all of the which allow access to financial or sexual
gratification for the unscrupulous.
What we need to do here, then, is to imagine the
unimaginable: if we want to protect the vulnerable in our communities from
predators, we have to be relentlessly vigilant; and we have to guard not only
our borders, but also our heartlands. What I suggest is that we internalise the
point of view of the predator by asking, “If I were a predator, how would I
like the church to be so that I could lead my double life in complete impunity?”
How to Control Christians – the Wolf’s Playbook
Sanctify Submission
The predator’s paradise is one in which the rank and file
membership are submissive to the will of the leader. This is best packaged as a
spiritual virtue, submission to God through submission to an absolutely correct
superior who has the complete power of direction in our lives.
If a leader is strong on this issue – suspect him. He might
be perfectly well intentioned; but who would know if he was secretly siphoning
off the money? Recently two nuns, the mother superior and the treasurer of an
orphanage, were convicted of diverting funds in order to go gambling at a
(presumably distant) casino over a period of many years. Everybody had been so
busy submitting to authority for their own spiritual good that they had allowed
orphans to be robbed – one of the big sins in the Bible! What a waste of spiritual
energy.
Accept Arrogance
Some Christians admire a sort of “godly” arrogance in their
leader, writing it off as a side effect of their sheer spiritual brilliance.
The self-image of the leader as superior to all others is fair enough because
it is true, and is true because it is fair enough. This closed circle of
narcissism is deeply suspicious. If somebody is acting like a narcissistic tit
then he is a narcissistic tit. Deal
with it. Do not hire him; or, if you have, start the process of getting rid of
him.
Demonise Diversity
Coupled with this is the tendency of the manipulative leader
to simplify everything – including simplifying the cultural profile of the
church. It is much easier to deceive a uniform group of people than it is to
deceive a diverse congregation. Uniformity and conformity are the bedrock of
predatory manipulation – it is much easier to control thought down channels of
popular slogans.
If your leader tends to drive away those who will not conform,
then there is room to doubt their hidden motives – a stage hypnotist will never
invite a non-suggestible subject on stage, and a predator priest will prefer to
keep the non-suggestible out of the congregation: certainly out of the
leadership. I remember one prize predator who held the theory that the first
act of a pastor in a new church had to be to dismiss the entire set of elders
and appoint his own people...and he said it with a straight face.
Criticise Critique
“Don’t be critical” is one of those sub-Christian mantras
that must be music to the ears of the predator. If a congregation can be
persuaded to switch off its critical capacity (i.e. the capacity to distinguish
between good and evil – we got it in the garden but now Satan wants to take
even that dubious good away from God’s people), then life becomes a lot easier
for a religious fraud. At my church the leadership somehow was persuaded not to
check the CV references of a charismatic new pastor. Despite the energetic
objections of one out-of-synch board member. By the time she had personally
investigated his references and proved them to be false to the core, the church
had suffered significant financial and reputational harm.
If you want to protect your most vulnerable members (or even
the far lesser goal of protecting your money), then you need a culture of
suspicion and critical thinking – even though it might not sit well with our
image of being Nice People. If we as the members of the church had been a
little bit nastier and more ruthless to the powerful, we would have been kinder
to the weak they destroyed.
Hyperbolise Holiness
If the leader or key volunteer somehow acquires an aura of
unapproachable, rarified holiness, be very careful. Christians love their
hyper-saintly leaders – somehow, they stand as an example of what ordinary
Christians aspire to. Their heroic prayer lives, their forty days of
fasting…all carefully Accidentally Made Public Knowledge even though such
practices are meant to be kept secret, according to Jesus.
Listen. Many ministers have had a high reputation for
holiness when it turned out that all along they were secretly having sex with
the pretty girl in the choir. I remember one – he’s not on the wall of former
ministers of my church, but he was such a glorious prayer warrior. A praying,
preying bastard – so smoothly religious and so callously evil.
Idolise Intensity
I get tired. Come Sunday my energy levels are low. It really
helps if my leader has worked himself up to an energetic pitch on a Sunday, and
carries me along in his train as he storms the Kingdom. But it’s dangerous.
Intensity might be genuine, but it also might easily be
false. As Hamlet complained, a good actor can switch on storms of energy and
gales of tears. Although I must note that in many African cultural settings
intensity is merely a benign cultural mask and an agreed form of ritual, with
only positive intent and no malice or deceit involved at all. But beware.
Sociopaths can give you whatever you want in order to get whatever they want, a
deal which will not work out well for the sheepish congregation. Quite often a most intensely spiritual leader
turns out to have been intensely dangerous.
Hijack Hermeneutics
For extra comfort, the predator leader will want to be in
control of how the Bible is interpreted. Genuine Christians are very interested
in being guided by the scripture – so if a predator can just insinuate himself between
the Bible and the congregation, then the work becomes much easier. If certain
interpretational manoeuvres are introduced and widely accepted, next thing it
will be quite plausible for the pastor to own a $50m private jet…or at least a
fleet of top end German cars.
Tyndale got burned at the stake – literally - for
translating the Bible into English, partly so that ordinary Christians could
hold corrupt leaders to account… so if the minister is the only one who is
calling the shots on interpretation, and if his interpretations of the Bible
are curiously favourable towards indulgence on his part – we are a congregation
of idiots. If the congregation abrogates its responsibility to read the Bible
independently and conversationally with others, then it has forfeited a key way
of keeping predators at bay.
I need to note that a frequent theological manoeuvre with
regard to interpretation of the Bible is to develop a small cycle of Bible
references that bolster a certain point of view. Anything can be defended as
“biblical” if the Bible is reduced to a hand-picked selection of the Bible.
Christian congregations need to become biblically literate – they need to know
the feel of the whole Bible, as a bank teller knows the feel of genuine
bank-notes,in order to defend themselves against the plausible half-truths of
the predator.
Deify Dominance
Typically, Christian congregations will promote the
dominance of men over women and children, and male leaders over the lot. As I
have noted, this is potentially deadly. If a predator targets a church like
that, he has half his work done for him before he begins. As he inveigles
himself into the guts of the church, he finds that his lust for power is not
only permitted, but praised. It is given the stamp of godliness. The problem
with benign patriarchy is that men are so easy to deceive.
Guys, didn’t Jesus say that those who would be leaders in
the congregation shouldn’t lord it over others as the gentiles do? Yes? No? I
see a lot of lording happening in the churches, a lot of big-deal big-shots who
would never be caught washing dishes in the church kitchen, telling a story in
the creche, or sweeping leaves in the yard. And quite a few of those
impressively dominant leaders are doing stuff on their study carpets with
little boys even as you read this.
Avoid Accountability
If a predator can avoid accountability, he is home free. If
nobody checks the books, the treasurer can siphon off tens of thousands for
years. It happened in a Christian organisation I know, where the treasurer
stole a fortune to pay for her fast food habit. Any corrupt abuse of power that
you hear about in society at large can also happen in the church. Believe it. Often
nobody gets properly audited until a lot of damage had been done, and then we
realise we have been taken for fools because we have foolishly ignored
common-sense precautions. Because the people who prey on the church seem so
nice and talk such a lovely line of easy Christian patter, and so easily
persuade us to not be quite so nit-picky about procedures…
If you as an ordinary member are not following up on what is
happening in the youth group or the church office, if you are assuming that the
stewards or the elders are doing that sort of thing…think again. A predator’s
priority is to manipulate those who should be holding him accountable into not
holding him accountable. Our primary defence is active involvement as lay
people at every level of leadership, and randomised checking that everything is
above board.
Leader Loyalty
The play book of the predator always includes getting the
leadership on his side, so that leaders will actually become his bodyguards,
forming the protective detail for his life of deception. These leaders are the
people who will blame anyone who accuses the leader of sexual impropriety of
being hysterical and attention seeking. And they will be the hardest to
convince that their chosen leader is deficient in any way, and they will be
super-credible because they are actually decent people, with no question marks
against their character. I have seen a pastor who openly kept a mistress in his
house…but nobody called him on the extra woman in his life because the leaders
were so fiercely loyal to him. Why? And what other damage was he capable of?
Leaders ought to be loyal to their people as well as
their pastor – and if they are not able to suspect their own motives for
maintaining their own egos, they will one day be faced with having reneged on
their stewardly duties. And in the meantime, girls and boys are being raped,
and the church is being used as a cover for the deeply evil people who find it
so easy to manipulate those who want to be nice.
Exceptionalise Explanations
And once the core leadership has been suborned, even if
unwittingly, then the strangest phenomenon starts to appear. The most elaborate
and unlikely explanations come to be believable. There was a spiritual need at
the casino. There was a spiritual discussion behind those closed doors. The
drugs in the study must have been cached by a choir-boy. The money for the mansion
must have been from an anonymous donor.
It is as if once the predator is ensconced, he can create
his own truth, confident that the energy to disbelieve him is higher than the
energy required to just go along with him. It applies to any narcissist
manipulator – they want create an alternative reality in which to entrap the
gullible, and through which to control the thinking of those around them.
Insulate Intimacy
The closed study is the most dangerous place for a
vulnerable person to be alone with a predator. The understandable desire for
privacy when dealing with sensitive private issues might be very important, but
legitimised insulation of intimacy is deadly. Once a predator holds the power
of closing the study door, there is no hope for however many victims
voluntarily enter the killing ground. Predators need privacy for their crimes
because, well….they wouldn’t want just anybody knowing what they were really
like.
The only recourse is to have independent monitoring of the
counselling traffic of the minister. A coffee shop is better than an office for
some meetings. An open-door policy should allow random access to another staff
member. Glass walls and doors are better than solid ones, no matter how
venerable the oak boards and cast-iron rivets. All of this is standard textbook
stuff and common sense.
Victimise the Violator
A woman I respect greatly was once the victim of sexual
predation by a high-profile New Denomination pastor. She has made a fantastic
recovery, does extremely helpful work, is raising a lovely family…but is still
deeply, deeply wounded. Part of the wounding, a large part, comes from the way
she was treated by the leadership of the church when she complained about the
actions of the pastor. She was treated as the seductive criminal who led the
saintly man of God away from his life of holiness. If it hadn’t been for her,
he would not have fallen. She was universally vilified and I suspect that her
capacity for faith will never be the same. She is a survivor trauma and of
what could be called called “secondary traumatisation”.
The only future-faith option for somebody who has been
through something like that is to have a faith that includes a deep mistrust of
faith practitioners and church structures. Oddly, there are many battle-scarred
Christians out there - believers in Jesus, followers of God – whose scars come
from battles with the church in its unholy alliance with the world, the flesh
and the devil. Cynical saints. Double converted disciples – away from the
darkness, and away from the church.
Sloganise Speech
I have touched on this already, and it is of course a
recognised predator’s tactic. Tell a lie often enough, tell it loudly enough, tell
it memorably enough, and people will believe it – didn’t Hitler say something
like that? People will believe that you went to heaven and took selfies there –
they will believe so securely that they will pay money for copies of the photos.
They will believe that grass is nutritious. They will believe that insect spray
drives off demons. They will believe that all the money did not come from
robbing banks, despite the cache of AK47s in the vestry. All true stories.
Give people a cool set of slogans, a recognisably “in” form
of speech, uniquely different from the unenlightened mass of so-called
Christians, and most people will be so delighted in playing soldiers that they
won’t notice the quiet distress of the sexually abused, or the criminal
activity happening on the shadier edges of the community.
Slogans motivate people who want to act meaningfully in this
world with maximum confidence and minimum distress. By encapsulating all the
important headings of the truth in a handful of slogans, the predator can be
assured of people looking the other way when he is doing his stuff. And, if he
does get caught, they will guarantee at least a remnant of slogan chanters
outside his court appearances.
Have I captured it all? Probably not. It is more than likely
that there are many “evil plans and clever tricks” (as both St. Paul and Roald
Dahl would have it) that I have not yet noticed. I would not be surprised,
given Paul’s “etc.” at the end of the list of evil stuff that humans are prone
to in Galatians 5. That being the case, I would really appreciate being filled
in on anything I’ve missed, because we can’t wait for the Pope to sort this out
or even the Methodist Conference. Holy, brooding, passionate and compassionate
suspicion needs to become part of the armoury of the bulk of Christians,
because this is how our churches are targeted and this is how they will be
targeted, and this is how children (and the rest of us) will continue to be
exploited and broken.
My next section contains some suggestions for making our
church communities more predator proof.
4. Predator-proofing the Church
I realise that just by writing this I am potentially giving
material to the unscrupulous about how to up their game in predation on the
Church. We have simply got to play a game in which although predators can see
us coming, and know our tactics, they are not able to resist us.
Believe the Gospel: Watching, Weeds and Wolves
Jesus prepped us. He primed us. If anybody is surprised to
find manipulative predators in the church it means she has not really read the
Bible with attention.
To start with, the Old Testament is virtually one long case
study in the abuse of power in relation to the people of God.
And the New Testament is full of passages that inculcate
healthy suspicion of would-be leaders. Jesus promised wolves in sheep’s
clothing, and there is a lot of bloodied wool around a lot of sheeply mouths.
But we never get a sermon on the danger of the person in the pew next to you.
Jesus promised that weeds would grow amongst the wheat of the kingdom, but we
never hear a sermon on the way pretend-Christians strangle the truth.
We hear fine-sounding sermons on the family, and church
leadership, but the preachers do not talk about how to escape abusive spouses
or parents who cover their vicious actions with a fine patina of Christian
religiosity. Preachers do not talk about the emotional and sexual abuse that
can possibly occur amongst the clergy. People are in fact taught a weak-minded
philosophy of acceptance, acquiescence and cooperation with leaders. What are
these warning passages there for if not to warn the church about what might
happen? After six decades in the church I realise that I have never been taught
to be cautious enough – my current experience comes through disappointment
after disappointment with the supposedly godly leadership of the church. Now
that I understand leadership in any community to be the acquisition of social
power, I am better placed to be vigilant rather than disappointed after the fact.
I can now stand up for the abused children of our communities. I only wish I
had been more open earlier to one of the suppressed emphases of the New
Testament.
Trust in God not Humanity – Hebrews and the “harsher judgement”
Jesus didn’t trust people because he knew what was in them,
we read. He knew the calibre of his disciples and predicted calamitous failure
on their part. We don’t share his cynicism – or should I say his realism? We
should. Without checks and balances we are prone to be truly disgusting. With
checks and balances the power shifts somewhat.
So, with this in mind, let’s revisit the Hebrews concept
that not many should desire to be teachers because they will be judged with a
harsher judgement. Heavenly judgement for sure, because God will hold us to
account for how we handled Scripture, how we selected and deselected, how we
drove our own agenda of ambition and status, how we blindly followed
doctrinaire doctrinal positions without ever radically submitting what we have
been told to what the Bible really says. But I am pretty sure that this should
also be read as the church community throwing a harsher, more revealing light
onto its leadership. The fewer shadows to hide in, the less easy it would be to
infiltrate the church organisation as a predator.
Beware of Favouritism
How many layers of protection is our leadership hidden
behind? How many levels of community membership are denied the right to
question the leader? How sweetly do we handle the powerful, and how harshly or
off-handedly do we handle the powerless…and from the point of view of making
our institutions predator proof, we mean the children.
So there needs to be a tribunal, or an ombudsman, or some
sort of champion of the powerless. And a strong reaction to pastoral over-reach
in terms of the power of the clergy and other leaders. It is clear that abuse
houses itself in opaque power structures. They might be benign in conception
and benign in intention…but in the end a predator will sniff them out and take
up his unassailable abode in the heart of the respectable church. “Nice” people
may have set up our church structures, but the unscrupulous with manipulate
them with consummate ease if our eyes are closed to the fatal flaws in the
system.
There is a “favouritism of issues” here as well. It really
doesn’t actually matter if we get defrauded of a million Rand or so; but it
matters infinitely and eternally if one of these little ones gets harmed. Jesus
made that extremely clear with reference to millstones; (He said nothing about
financial fraud, though). My church, my local community, has been through
multiple predatory episodes during my life. But I am not aware of any corporate
policies in place after the minister-and-choir-girl incident, or any of the
others. Rather, nobody talks about them, and it is considered a better
spiritual path to follow to not speak of the matter again. There is no handing
down of wisdom to help future generations of leaders. We needed some guidance
and some assurances which we never got; and this culture of shamed silence,
resulting in a redacted history, leaves us vulnerable to being targeted over
and over.
Lose Your Power and Take Back Your Power
Quite frankly, leaders with bloated status need to learn to
take, or be expected to take, or be made to take the path of John the Baptist.
They must become less so that Jesus may become greater. John Wesley
passionately advocated the right of private judgement – ordinary Christians
must be free to read the Scripture and decide whether or not their leaders were
adequately approximating the values of the Gospel. Lamin Sanneh, the great
Gambian theologian, points out how powerful the Scriptures have been in
disrupting structures of colonial power. I believe that the scriptures are
always powerful in the hands of the Spirit at breaking apart the pretensions of
humans, and the exposing of the truth. And predators are the colonisers of the
church. They take and take, and only break. And what they break is innocent
lives.
If we believe that the Word of God is as biting as a
two-edged sword, let’s see some damage to the hidden abusers in our churches.
Spiritual Discernment & Common-Sense.
A social worker will expect to find a certain percentage of
abusers and abused in any cross section of society. We need to swallow our
pride and acknowledge that the same percentage of abused and abusers will be
present in our churches. The church is intended to be such a cross section. Starting
from that acknowledged reality we then need an attitude and mechanisms to break
interlocked cycles of trauma and predation. But to do that we have to have a
common-sense acceptance of truth, not a weak and pious denial of the scourge in
our midst.
Hiring Protocols
We must ask potential leaders close questions about
predatory behaviours when they are interviewed – both their own vulnerability,
and also what their attitude would be towards predatory behaviour on the part
of others. Do they have a robust enough pastoral sense to stand up for the
vulnerable? Or are they the sort of people-pleasers who would be all too easy
for predators to manipulate? We need to insist on police background checks, and
proper procedures in checking CVs – if my church had done so, we wouldn’t have
been left paying off hotel and gambling bills for the conman who insinuated
himself into our community as a super-pastor.
A Culture of Accountability
Every aspect of ministry needs to be monitored – for the
sake of the good leaders as well as the sake of the evil ones. Pastoral probity
needs to be provable, in just the same way that financial probity needs to be
constantly monitored and verified. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
(to paraphrase John Curran). Every holder of power should hold it with fear for
their own capacity to misuse it. And every power holder should be kindly but
uncompromisingly held accountable for every human interaction they have on
behalf of the church. This perhaps sounds oppressive…but who is speaking up for
the ghastly oppression of sexually abused children? Surely a small sacrifice of
privacy is worth it in order to avoid the large crime of conspiracy?
One of my big issues is that what I have described as the
play-book of the predator bears a frightening similarity to “business as usual”
in many congregations. Leadership is run with so much manipulation and opacity,
so much arbitrary authority and shelter from accountability, that it seems
inevitable that what we are currently doing will make us vulnerable to invasion
and colonisation by predators...if they are not already ensconced in the inner
sanctum of our churches.
5. Hope for the Hurt
I am aware that all that I have written here amounts to
shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. I am desperately sorry
that the church has been so naïve for so long, so criminally complicit in the rape
and trauma of children due to our lack of oversight. I feel personally
implicated in every incident of violation and really deeply ashamed that I am
only getting my thoughts together on this subject now.
Incredible harm has been allowed and perpetrated by the
church through sheer failure of compassion, expressed in thoughtless reactions
to cases of abuse, and desperate desire for business as usual to continue. Our
carpets crackle and snap with the bones of the skeletons we have swept under
them, and we worship on a bumpy terrain of unacknowledged sin. We are a
shameful people with a shameful history. Anybody looking back at the life of
their church over the past decades without a sense of the harm done to the
vulnerable by this community is making God out to be a liar (as John would have
it).
But there is hope for the hurt.
Finding the lost
Gentle conversations with those who are estranged fairly
readily turns up terrible stories of abuse at the hands of religious leaders,
specifically, in this case, Christian leaders. Pain or numbness are the two
great signs of injury. Those who have been hurt need champions who will connect
with people in the spaces between the churches and find out why they are so far
from the people of God. Start that conversation and the tales of abuse start to
come rolling in.
The Church as church allowed this to happen on its watch. So,
the Church as Church should be involved in putting this wrong right – not that
the harm of deceptive abuse can ever be made as if it had never happened.
Perhaps we need a special type of interstitial clergy, specially appointed at
the cost of a penitent church, to live amongst these savagely injured little
ones. Not clergy who are designated to re-institutionalise the lost into the
church (let it not be), but to suffer alongside them in exile and to reassure
them that they can indeed find life again. But maybe that is wishful thinking –
can clergy ever be unconcerned with people coming to church? From my deep fund
of conversations with outsiders it seems unlikely. But the fact remains is that
these children, as children and grown to adulthood, need a healing touch, even
if they can never stomach a touch from the church again.
Healing the wounds: Justice and Sanctuary
From everything we hear victims say, we know that healing
needs justice. And justice for the hurt involves recognition of the wrong they
have received. Perhaps we need a Truth and Reconciliation commission for the
invisible victims of the church, a standing commission that can monitor and
challenge the leadership of the church to take responsibility for sheltering
predators and for being predators. This would bring issues to the attention of
the church that we have not been noticing (or worse, noticing but ignoring),
and would inform our actions with the active input of the victims. People have
been silenced too often and too effectively, and so we need to take a rest from
our inveterate talking and actually listen to what has happened.
Some successful criminal prosecutions and some jail-time for
paedophile pastors would be a great help too. A little appropriate vengeance in
the present age would perhaps reassure victims that the church had, albeit
reluctantly, started to repent.
Some high-profile teaching and sermons on the dangers of
predation in the church might help – and perhaps a stream of instruction in the
training of ministers.
And a formal dedication to a discipline of transparency
between clergy and congregation would be a helpful sign that the suffering of
the victims had found a hearing. The institution of random checking and
appropriate observationability of the closed processes of counselling would
help victims to believe the church was serious about its defences against
predators. A public policy of protection against leader-predation would be
somewhat reassuring to the survivors of institutional abuse. But let me make
one thing clear: church cannot continue as usual. “As Usual” has been the
playground of truly inhumane violators of our children and our trust in every
way.
And lastly, there is something that perhaps can be restored. An unviolated childhood
is not possible to restore, of
course. There is no reparation that will make up for that desolate reality. But
there is something that should be given back – a place and community of
sanctuary. Part of the vicious callousness of the predator is that they do not
mind taking all sense of sanctuary away from their victims. So, the church,
which ought to have been a place of rescue and safety, turns out to have been a
place from which the victims must escape or be rescued. What can I say? The
abused need safe places to talk, safe relationships to confide in. Often, they
spend half a life-time in coerced silence before they can gather the courage
and strength to divulge the cancerous history of their abuse.
Who will listen to them? Where will they listen to them? It
would be cruel to expect any of these hurt ones to ever return to a church
building or an institutional structure. Some of them will have the courage to
take their cases to open court. But many will just live with their misery. We
need, perhaps, to listen to the survivors of clergy abuse in the new places
where they have found a measure of safety: in bars and on beaches, in special
interest societies and in random encounters in coffee shops.
And if we do not take concrete steps to seek out the injured
to hear them out, if we don’t take steps to restructure our congregation &
leadership accountability, and if we do not rigorously pursue legal
accountability for perpetrators, I don’t give a fuck how religious we are, we
are still part of the problem and deserve all the disgust we might get. Whether
we like it or not, we are the deceptive, child-molesting church. So, in fact,
bring on the curses. We have betrayed Jesus and made victims of the
defenceless. We stand defenceless before our accusers.
[1]
Some finance-only con-artists and adult-only sexual offenders might be offended
at being grouped with paedophiles…but their techniques are broadly similar,
and, quite frankly, once one has been conned in one area one is then never sure
as to what other areas the con might be covering. My interest is chiefly in
promoting vigilance against paedophiles gaining sanctuary for their criminal
activity within church structures; but vigilance against one is vigilance
against all predators.
[2]
I have no intention of looking at the way predators insert themselves into
sports coaching programs, schools, medical practices, etc., although some of
the issues will cross over. There is no “excuse by companionship” for the
Christian church.
[3]
Let us consider the scriptural assertion that “Nobody can say ‘Jesus is Lord’
except by the Holy Spirit”. A little context is helpful here – nobody in our
safe Western World would be likely to admit this if the consequence was
beheading, crucifixion, or being thrown to the wild animals. Predators only
come to the church because it is a soft billet. As I say, words, including
Christian words, are cheap.
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