I’ll never forget the countless youth group lessons and sermons I listened to about darkness. Or fixing it, rather. We must cast it out. We ourselves must be light, illuminating uncertainty and the awful things that can happen to us in the dark. Darkness is where evil happens, where mold grows, where people go when they want to be bad. In order to get rid of the dark we must confess, we have to bring what grew in the darkness to leadership or trusted individuals. Opportunities for darkness have no reason to be in our lives.
Unless…
A deleted tweet from Brian Houston makes the point for me:
A real tweet from the account of Hillsong Church’s leader, the founder of the evangelical world’s star-studded, do-it-all institution. He’s the author of over a dozen books and owner of an 8-figure bank account. There’s plenty of speculation as to whether he confused the “post” button for the “search” button, and something like 12 minutes later he tweeted a quick “I think I’ve been hacked” before an official statement went out about the tweet being from someone who somehow had his login information that was trying to embarrass and humiliate him. Since I put lots less value in Christian leadership than I did previously, this fun event doesn’t matter all that much to me. It does remind me, though, of the darkness.
Did Brian actually did go to twitter for a video or two of ladies and girls? It’s impossible to know, but I do know what would happen if he was caught doing such a thing: nothing that we’d hear about in this decade. I can say this with confidence because Brian’s father Frank sexually abused multiple children, to an extent we’ll never know, while preaching sermons every Sunday in what would merge into one of the world’s largest churches. Look it up. Some 40 years after the fact it’s finally coming to light, to the extent of thousands of dollars of cover money being paid, but my point is that going to this church, participating in its music, and attending conferences put on by this church you’d never know. I can say this confidently because I never knew. If there weren’t news outlets covering this story you’d never know. Put in the hands of the leadership of the institution with the most eyes on it to be “like Jesus” it was hushed until Frank was too old for it to matter to be “of any importance.”
This brings me to a statistic about sexual violence against children. According to a 55-week running independent analysis of people who had made the news for sexual abuse against children originally designed to study if drag queens are in fact predators (https://www.whoismakingnews.com), 8% of the reported child sex abusers were utilizing the religion industry in some way: pastors, spouses of pastors, volunteers in church and youth groups, et cetera (in case you were wondering, drag queens made up 0.012% of these numbers). That accounts for hundreds and hundreds of abuse cases against children that are reported. Every abuse case that I know of, even ones where adults are the victims, haven’t been officially reported.
“Abuse thrives in silence. We stay silent because there’s shame and humiliation.” -Kathrine Kubler, The Program
Everyone wants to believe that their own safe space isn’t susceptible to the possibility of a betrayal of trust. So much so that they’ll protect their own worldview by silencing victims. The silencing usually isn’t intentional and other than the abuser there’s never just one person to blame. A community built on love cultivating anything other than love is unfathomable to the people who have been pumping nothing but love into their environment. Therein lies the silencing. The allegations of abuse toward someone who’s been given absolute trust by hundreds, if not thousands of people feel like lies so they’re dismissed. I’m telling you–trust that hasn’t been earned being given freely is built into the fabric of the church that I know. So is distrust of victims. Little girls are told in a roundabout way that if they wear shorts that are too short they don’t deserve to be treated like a human with respect. I grew up with the idea that my heart and eyes were to be protected by the young women around me and anything perverted I did, while technically my responsibility, was slightly more understandable if the victim was dressed in a certain way.
But honestly it gets worse. Other than a misunderstood and mistranslated bible verse, the main reason I heard for women not being allowed in leadership positions was that since they were women, they’d be distractions for the men in the audience. No matter how they were dressed. Men couldn’t be trusted to have the self control to be audience members but they could be trusted behind closed doors with people who were actually vulnerable, because that makes sense. This is what it’s all built on, somehow. Even when women are allowed to hold a microphone in front of people it’s with a grain of salt in most religious places.
The worst part about this whole thing to me is that everyone important in the church acknowledges that it’s wrong, but for the sake of not creating division nobody speaks up in an effective manner. I can’t tell you how many conversations I had with bosses and leadership that said “we’re just waiting for the older guys to die out so we can implement a more progressive stance.” The only way I found to speak about it appropriately was to leave the church because, hot take here, it’s impossible to change from the inside. The system is too big and when people’s livelihoods are involved everyone will choose their family and personal wellbeing over the good of the whole. It may be a pessimistic way of looking at it but I haven’t seen anything change from the inside, despite best efforts.
This is the darkness that grows mold. It’s darkness created by people closing their eyes when the mold is hard to look at.
I feel like I’m attacking my friends and their livelihood sometimes for talking about this stuff. I’m telling the people I went to school with and learned and grew with that they’re contributing to a system that allows predators to go unchecked. But it’s not their fault. It’s no one’s fault except the abusers. At what point does enabling and being part of a system become the problem, though? At what point is it Brian Houston’s fault for knowing his dad gave thousands and thousands of dollars of his sheep’s tithe money to pay out victims? At what point is it all broken?
This isn’t something that leadership should look at and say “we should be better and fix this.” This should be raising flag after flag that behind closed doors there is brokenness protected by power, and accountability is only for those who need to go to the church to belong. Accountability isn’t for the powerful unless they want to lose power.
I don’t know how many times I’m supposed to write about abuse in the church when I’m not a victim of it, per se. But watching people I love experience it firsthand is traumatizing enough in and of itself, and knowing the people who should be listened to are deplatformed by shame and fear is disorienting.
Who knows if it’ll change. Probably not. But if I learned anything from youth group, it's that we're supposed to light up the darkness.