It was everyone’s worst nightmare.
A girl — barely a teenager — held her mother’s hand and told me, their pastor, that she had been sexually abused by her grandfather since she was eight years old. This girl had grown up in the church. Her grandfather was a member and a regular in Sunday worship.
There are so many things I did wrong over the next couple years — he was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to far more years than he had life remaining. To say it turned the community upside down is an understatement. Sometimes the only thing I am sure I got right was believing her. At least, that is the only thing I have never questioned.
Once again, the news cycle this week has been flooded by reports of sexual assault, though this time a rarity has occurred — a famous personality has been sentenced for these crimes… the Weinstein Effect, it has come to be called.
In recent years, this abuser had made a very public conversion to evangelical Christianity, finding a safe haven where other sexual predators and pedophiles have likewise known they would be embraced. There, and for the last years, he has seemed to “perform” Christianity. As an example, he carried a bible everywhere he went (including on interviews and to court) that had colored tabs like one might add to find references quickly; and yet after he himself said he brought it to court for the support he found in a particular verse, he could not find the verse in almost two minutes of searching.
Evangelical Christianity has been quick to embrace a conversion story — the more depraved or public, the more readily they are accepted. This man is just one of many that fit that bill. While it was decades before that he had faced the demons of his drug abuse and navigated recovery, his entire public persona had been built on poking at the ridiculousness of rigid belief that fails to be human and compassionate. He was in some ways a “liberal darling” for a time. To have “captured” him into the evangelical fold would have been seen as a victory, and thus not worth being given a close look.
But this isn’t just a problem for evangelical, American Christianity — though that system seems tailor made to welcome the worst of it. Most American Christians have this strange relationship with celebrity — as though a famous or successful person believing as we do is an affirmation of the truth we believe. And that tends to mean we more rapidly and less critically accept their “conversions” or “professions” in ways that frequently complicate our own witness down the road.
Somehow we have to find ways of embracing and extending grace while not losing our faculties at the same time. The New Testament letters speak most frequently of “testing ourselves,” (e.g. 2Corinthians 13:5), but it also indicates that communities of faith are to “test” those they are elevating into leadership positions (e.g. 1Timothy 3). Perhaps when we are considering our public embracement of public personalities, these are the measures we make for them? These situations are so different than those facing the first-century Church, it is impossible to find any apples-to-apples equivalence; we must adapt what we find into our evolving world.
But one thing is I believe is certain: we must do better about believing women, and about making the world safer for the girls who grow up in it.
What do you think? I’d love to continue the conversation with you!
Remember, we’re all in this together.
Pastor Michael