Vocation and Violence

The Church and #MeToo

Miryam Clough

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000566482
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

As #MeToo and its sister movement #ChurchToo demonstrated, sexual violence is systemic in many and varied workplace settings, including Christian churches, and can destroy women's careers and vocational aspirations.

The study draws on empirical evidence – personal stories from survivors and the views of church leaders and educators – in dialogue with theoretical perspectives, to consider clergy sexual abuse of adult women and the conditions that support it. Institutional abuse only changes when survivors come forward. This study focusses on New Zealand Anglicanism, the locus of the author's experience, and has resonance for a range of denominational settings. It aims to be a useful resource to clergy, ministry educators, and those training for ministry, and to academics and scholars with an interest in theology, gender, and professional ethics. Notably, it will be a potentially helpful text for women survivors of sexual misconduct by clergy, not least those who are considering a future in the church or grieving the loss of one.

The volume concludes by suggesting that alternative theological models and relational ethics are essential if the church is to truly address the problem of clergy sexual abuse and give greater priority to the abused.

1Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003164937-1

#MeToo, #ChurchToo

This volume will demonstrate that #MeToo is as relevant within the church as in the secular arena and that clergy, who are often held in the public imagination to be ‘above’ abusive or criminal activity, are as susceptible to personal and professional boundary violations as those in secular positions of power. Specifically, it will draw attention to a hitherto neglected aspect of clergy sexual misconduct: its effects on the vocations of women in the church. Additionally, it will examine some of the discourses within the Christian tradition that produce rape culture: the culture in which the sexual abuse and exploitation of women by men is facilitated and sustained.

In 2006, African American civil rights activist Tarana Burke founded me too, a movement instigated to provide support and advocacy for women and girls of colour from low-income communities who had suffered sexual abuse, and to interrupt sexual violence.¹ As a youth worker, Burke had regretted not disclosing her own experience of abuse to a young girl who had confided that her stepfather was sexually abusing her. Burke recognised that the simple phrase ‘me too’ would have reduced the girl’s sense of isolation and shame and enabled her to seek support.

In October 2017, in response to reports of multiple accusations of sexual abuse against Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein, actor Alyssa Milano encouraged women who had been abused to respond to her on Twitter with the statement ‘me too’ to foreground the scale and magnitude of sexual abuse. Overnight, Milano’s tweet went viral. As #MeToo rapidly gained momentum, countless women in the film industry, politics, the media, and academia revealed that they too had similar experiences.

Social media quickly took this expanding narrative of sexual abuse further, beyond the workplace into homes, schools, university and college campuses, churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples, into hospitals and clinics, political and social gatherings, into social care organisations and communities. Many men were shocked by the scale of it. Perhaps few women were surprised. #MeToo confirmed that sexual abuse is pandemic in scope, and its incidence is overwhelming.

In November 2017, #MeToo was joined by #ChurchToo, the hashtag coined by American former evangelicals Emily Joy and Hannah Pasch, whose revelations of abuse by church leaders triggered a flood of similar disclosures from women and men in predominantly evangelical churches around the world. In 2018, journalist Becca Andrews commented, ‘[a] reckoning has been a long time coming for the evangelical community’. Prior to this, periodic disclosures of abuse by leaders in America’s evangelical megachurches had attracted significant media attention, prompting critical discussion of the patriarchal theology espoused by the churches’ predominantly white, heterosexual male pastors. However, most of these cases had soon faded from view with only minimal repercussions for the men involved (Andrews 2018). Subsequent to #ChurchToo, formal accusations of abuse by church leaders skyrocketed. By July 2019, over 100 Southern Baptist pastors and a number of leaders of evangelical megachurches across America were the subjects of abuse complaints (Barnett 2019).

The Weinstein scandal alone had demonstrated that dozens of young women with serious and passionate aspirations in the film industry – hard-working, talented young women who were earnestly pursuing their vocations – had found themselves subjected to sexual harassment and abuse. Instead of being supported and mentored by senior men in their field in the way their young male colleagues would be, these women were coerced or forced into unwanted sexual activity, often silenced by the promise of work if they complied and the very real threat of failure if they did not. How did Weinstein get away with abusing so many women and for so many years?

Despite nearly half a century of sexual harassment legislation, this abusive culture has clearly been slow to change. A poll conducted by MSN in 2017 showed that 45% of women respondents reported experiencing sexual harassment at work and that three times as many women as men reported experiencing workplace sexual harassment. Seventy-three percent of women and 81% of men had never reported their abuse (Gillett 2017).

#ChurchToo has highlighted that sexual harassment and abuse is no less prevalent in Christian communities and workplaces than in secular ones. While many churches began developing policies to address clergy misconduct in the 1990s, understanding of this issue remains limited. Victims may be blamed for the abuse they experience and shunned by their local churches. Equally, they may be re-victimised and silenced by unwieldy and intrusive processes driven by lawyers and insurers. A high level of cognitive dissonance may occur when respected church leaders are accused of abuse. In early 2020, for example, an internal investigation conducted by L’Arche International established that its esteemed Catholic founder, Jean Vanier, had engaged in coercive sexual relationships with at least six women to whom he had been offering spiritual guidance. The revelations caused widespread dismay (L’Arche International 2020). The reluctance to accept that church leaders are capable of abuse means that victims are often not believed. However, data from a range of sources suggests that false allegations of sexual abuse are unusual and that genuine cases are vastly under-reported (Berglund 2020, 61). The process of reporting abuse is often so traumatic and costly that victims are too afraid to do it.

Effect on vocations

One aspect of clergy sexual harassment and abuse that is under-represented in the body of literature on this subject is the impact that this form of gendered violence has on women’s careers in the church, indeed on their vocations to Christian ministry. That is the focus of this volume.

What happens to the vocation of a young woman when the boss who coerces her into a sexual relationship is a priest or minister? Where does responsibility lie in this scenario and how do the church hierarchy and wider Christian community manage the situation when it comes to light? What biblical, theological, and wider socio-cultural discourses underpin the way such situations are perceived and managed? Whose vocation is respected and validated and whose is refuted and denied? To brutally obstruct an individual’s vocation through sexual misconduct is to violate not only their emotional and physical boundaries, but their sense of purpose, their spiritual integrity, and their personhood.

While I have found accounts in the literature of or by women who were variously lay church leaders, seminarians, clergy, or nuns, detailing their abuse and the way their lives and ministry were affected by it, there is not, to my knowledge, a discrete text that focusses in any depth on the effects of clergy misconduct on women’s vocations. This volume is an attempt to bridge that gap and to foreground the specific injustice dealt to those women whose ministry has been undermined or whose vocations have been denied because a clergyman failed to maintain his professional boundaries.

In more conservative churches where discourses of male headship and female subordination dominate, male sexual prowess and aggressiveness are tolerated, if not actively encouraged, while female worth is tied to sexual purity and restraint. Women are essentially second-class citizens. Even in more liberal churches, the legacy of the patriarchal Christian tradition leaves its traces. In such an environment, it follows that any woman who has a vocation to church leadership may have to fight for it. If she has been forced or coerced into sexual activity with a male cleric, that struggle will be all the more difficult. At the very least, clergy harassment or abuse will constitute a profound distraction from her spiritual path. Most likely, it will impede or end the progress of her vocation and ministry. A vocation is more than just a job. It touches a person’s very identity and their relationship with God, the essence of who they are. When it is violated, the wounds run deep and long.

To harm the vocation of another is a fundamental violence. To obstruct God’s calling of an individual to ministry on the basis of gender is a profound arrogance. That arrogance is also evident when churches and individuals within them obstruct the vocations of others on the basis of race, colour, disability, or sexual orientation. Jesus did not set out to create a cult of middle class, straight, white men, but if we look at the hierarchies of the main Christian denominations in the West, that is often what we see.

Conversely, many of Jesus’ first witnesses were women: old women, bleeding women, foreign women, ‘fallen’ women. God chose a young unmarried woman to be the mother of Jesus, yet churches grossly abused young unmarried mothers for decades by incarcerating them in punitive mother and baby homes and Magdalen laundries and taking their babies.² God has chosen countless women to minister in the church, but men have said ‘no’, and men have said ‘stay silent’. More than this, some men have chosen to exploit the vocations of some of those women for their own sexual gratification.

Terminology and scope of the study

Clergy sexual misconduct occurs in all Christian denominations and for ease, unless I am making a specific point about a particular denomination, I will use the term ‘the church’ as an umbrella designation for Western institutional Christianity.

Some survivors of clergy sexual misconduct prefer to describe their experience as abuse. I have struggled to describe my personal experience as abuse, preferring the term ‘misconduct’, although some may feel this term does not give sufficient weight to the issue. Perhaps this is a defence on my part. It is never easy to acknowledge that one has been the victim of abuse or to fully recognise the long-term effects of it (Stephenson 2016, 13). I use the terms ‘sexual misconduct’ and ‘sexual abuse’ interchangeably and use the term ‘sexual harassment’ to describe unwanted, non-physical violations (e.g., sexual innuendo, unwelcome comments, persistent unwanted attention). In each case, I am describing or referring to the violation of a personal and professional boundary by a member of the clergy or church leadership who is in a position of power by virtue of his role in relation to a congregant, student, or counselee. Such violations vary in nature and degree from case to case. They may involve verbal harassment or abuse, emotional and/or spiritual manipulation. They may involve sexual activity that appears to be consensual but is not because of the power imbalance in the relationship, or they may involve physical intrusion and violence. What these violations have in common is that they are located in the areas of sexuality and gender, and they involve the abuse of power, trust, and fiduciary duty.³

Any sexually intrusive act is an act of violence. This includes acts of sexual harassment that are often thought to be less serious – abusive comments, wolf-whistling, and sexual innuendo, for instance. These are, in fact, foundational elements in a misogynist culture that produces more egregious acts of sexual and gender-based violence that start with uninvited touch and groping and end with rape and murder. The trivialising of any form of sexual harassment, assault, or misconduct and the failure to name it as such – misnaming a breach of fiduciary duty as ‘an affair’, for instance – serves only to perpetuate the oppression that is gender-based violence.

While it is the case that both men and women abuse and both men and women are victims of abuse, there is a consensus among professionals and researchers in the field that most clergy abusers are men and most adult victims are women (Cooper-White 2013, 62; Garland 2013, 121). This text will focus mainly, but not exclusively, on the abuse of adult women by male clergy and will refer to abusers as male and to victims as female. All abuse is unacceptable, unprofessional, unethical, and can have devastating consequences irrespective of the genders of the perpetrator and the victim. There is not scope in this volume for a wider exploration of clergy misconduct. This has been, and no doubt will continue to be taken up elsewhere. To provide context however, I will touch briefly here on clergy abuse of children and young people.

Child sexual abuse by clergy

In 2003, the Boston Globe won a Pulitzer Prize for public service for exposing systemic child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy in the Boston area. In the 20 or so years prior to that, sporadic revelations of clergy abuse were viewed as isolated incidents, and the subject was not widely discussed (Henley 2010). In 2018, more than 300 priests in Pennsylvania were found to have sexually abused over 1000 children since 1947 (Clohessy 2018), while in Australia, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse received over 4000 reports of sexual abuse of children in religious institutions. Perpetrators included clergy, religious brothers and sisters, church elders, teachers, care workers, and youth group leaders (Commonwealth of Australia 2017, 11). The report notes that while such abuse is by no means unique to the church, there were more allegations of abuse in religious institutions than in those run by any other management group. Church-based abuse is, the report states, particularly disturbing due to the high level of trust and respect placed in that institution, and the consequences for victims and their families are devastating, with lasting impacts on faith and belief. In the main, the perpetrators of abuse in religious institutions were ‘people that children and parents trusted the most and suspected the least’ (ibid. 12). Case studies conducted by the inquiry revealed that church leaders knew of abuse and either failed to act or acted to protect perpetrators. Notably, ‘[i]nstitutional reputations and individual perpetrators were prioritised over the needs of victims and their families’ (ibid. 11). The cost of confronting abuse is high. Anglican Bishop of Newcastle and clergy abuse survivor Greg Thompson resigned in 2017 after his attempts to expose clergy abuse led to a sustained campaign against him by church members (Davey 2017). Thompson described efforts to conceal extensive child abuse by clergy in the diocese as a ‘religious protection racket’ (Wakatama 2017).

At the time of writing, inquiries into abuse in care are underway in the UK and in New Zealand. In both the Australian and UK inquiries, misogyny, clericalism, and a failure to be open and non-shaming about sexuality have been identified as contributing factors to child abuse within the church.⁴ According to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse’s (IICSA)’s report on the Anglican Church in the UK (2020, vi)

[t]he culture of the Church of England faci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 #MeToo
• 3 #ChurchToo
• 4 #WhereTo?
• References
• Index