A Useful Fool

And we know this: if people knew what we know, these men would be nothing.

--Elisabeth Arnold Ingram, “When Their Titles Fall”

A benevolent patriarch, one of us commented after our first meeting with him, over Zoom. She said it with an eyeroll, the way you can when all of you know the truth, which is that there’s no such thing.

But “benevolent patriarch” is a useful tongue-in-cheek code when navigating the waters we were in. It applies to a certain, soft-presenting kind of church man, one that doesn’t lead with ego or overt charisma. The benevolent patriarch has a warm, grandfatherly demeanor that can be as welcoming as any other brick wall painted to look like a door. He might seem to be either the answer to your prayers or the evidence of their inefficacy, depending on where in the trajectory of inevitable disillusionment you happen to meet him.

For most of the duration of my acquaintance with him, I perceived him as moderately useful. Had I been more trusting, I might have placed him more solidly in the “kind” category, so it’s probably for the best that I’ve learned not to give trust much airspace when dealing with his demographic. By “his demographic,” I don’t mean male, or white, or grandfather-age, though this benevolent patriarch was all of those things. I mean church leaders in the process of adjudicating abuse reports. (It may be an indulgence to call this a demographic, but indulge me, please.)

Sometimes, just to get anywhere at all, we have to extend a little bit of conditional trust. The world feels like a better place when I allow myself that. Both of these things are true: I am built for trust, and I expect betrayal from church leaders, because after all these years, I’d be a fool not to.

This cassandraic armor I’ve built up over the years is very heavy. I long to leave it behind. But here is a problem with benevolent patriarchs: they try to remove your armor, and they don’t ask permission first.

I have a compulsion to write about this memory, because the imprint that it left on me could calcify, so easily, into an interpretive binary: either I am to blame, or he is. And I am not to blame. Though like every victim of masculine overconfidence, I’m conditioned to blame myself.

This isn’t a story about sexual violence against me, and it’s not a story of sexual violence perpetrated by him. This benevolent patriarch is not, to my knowledge, any kind of deliberate predator. But it is a story about sexual violence, and the way predators manage to spread their culpability around, until the confusion is so thick that every complicit party manages to slip away with an exculpatory narrative that suits their own emotional needs.

It's not really a story at all, to tell the truth; it’s a skeleton of fragments, built small enough to go unnoticed, and the fragments come from one story and a thousand stories at once. Patriarchy loves the big redemptive story, where bad men do bad things and good men save women from the bad men, assuming that the women are virtuous and believable and empty of will and their own ideas. There is no such story here. Patriarchy makes fools of decent men who buy into its promises, until their decency dissolves into mirage. Behind the mirage is a wall, and behind the wall is another wall. I don’t know when the walls stop. If I did, I’d be telling a different story, possibly one with a beginning and an end.

Instead, I build piles of metaphors, images. Here’s an image: me, on an October Saturday in a year I won’t name, in my garden, taking a phone call I don’t want to be taking from a man I don’t want to be talking to, about another man who is a rapist and a sadist, a man whose psychopathology is of a type with which our culture is perpetually both revolted and seduced. The benevolent patriarch is seduced. I can hear it in his voice. He is ebullient, and he wants me to be ebullient, too. The second I hear his voice, I know he has just become enthusiastically useful to someone else.

All I’m going to say about the abuse she suffered is that it was meant to erase her, and it went on for decades, and no one has ever been held accountable for any of it. Not by a church. Not by benevolent patriarchs. Not by the law. Not by the celebrity plaintiff lawyers. Not by the media. Not by secular cultural outrage.

No one fucking helped us.

The ringleader is a capitalist apex predator. He is no more interesting than any other of the parasitic humans who fit this description. When they become religious leaders in the United States, their avarice is lavishly protected by our tax codes. The things they would rather do than disclose their Form 990s would puncture the lie of their righteousness in an instant, but fortunately for them, hardly anyone is asking those questions very persistently. No one wants to deal with the kinds of lawyers who defend these kinds of people.

I’m far less interested in what makes narcissistic evangelical leaders tick than I am in how and why we, collectively, have allowed them to have such unchecked power. The cost they exact from the rest of society is evident everywhere, the damage barely contained in doctors’ and therapists’ offices, in abandoned police reports, in survivor support groups, in half-baked and truncated investigations, in shame-soaked financial misery, in broken relationships and shattered families and unfathomable quiet suffering. Those of us outside of the authoritarian cultures of evangelicalism can tell ourselves that people choose these churches of their own free will and can leave whenever they want, but that’s not how high-control religion works.

This is all a way of saying that you don’t need to know the details of this story/not-story to grasp the plot.

If you’re wondering if she’s tried x___, or y____, or z____, she’s tried. If we lived by the truths that women like her carry in their very bodies, we’d have a different world.

On the phone, on an October Saturday in my garden, the benevolent patriarch tells me something, and the thing he tells me is meant to poison me against the truth. He is high right now on the glow from another man’s impunity. There is no reasoning with him.

What he tells me is wholly illogical, but more importantly, a threat. I know immediately that it is a threat. I wish I could tell you why, but even that is too exposing. The benevolent patriarch is too much of a fool to understand what kind of messenger he has become. I can hear that he has no idea that he’s threatening us, no idea what role he’s been duped into playing in this alpha/beta script rolling out like some Trumpworld jackass fantasy.

I feel the threat land on my nervous system, and as my adrenaline drops, I will it downwards, underground, breathing into my feet, planted on my weed-strewn patio. I study the browning lambsquarter in my garden. I want to run the little, humble seeds between my fingers, but I can’t take a step towards them. Somehow I know that I have to stay rooted here on this patio tile if I’m going to get out this call without making everything worse.

I get as much information as I can, for the others. I am as nice as I can muster. I gradually get myself off the phone with this once-helpful man for whom I can no longer feel anything but skin-crawling disdain.

Then I go indoors again, and scream, and scream, and scream.

It’s tempting to blame ourselves for hoping it would be different with this particular useful fool, given everything we already knew about the demonstrated futility of trying to curb abuse through church process. But we refuse that blame. I refuse to chastise any of us, least of all her, for extending some conditional trust in return for the appearance of genuine kindness. (When I write “us,” I mean her, and me, and a few other women, the likes of whom I could not survive without.)

Up to that point, no one with the power to do anything about it had even been kind. It’s a perverse thing about the kind of extreme, sadistic violence that these Christian men perpetrated—hearing about it makes people disappear. Sometimes they disappear in the moment, and you see their absence in their eyes. You can’t blame them for it, usually; you never know what people have been through. But sometimes it’s their job to help, and they can’t, or don’t, or won’t. Sometimes blame should stick to them.

And I still don’t accept that it needs to be that way. I don’t accept that we live in a world where there are no people who can learn to help better, to listen better, to care more and do more. I don’t accept it because I know her, and I know the other people I mean when I write “us,” and we aren’t exotic creatures with superpowers. There are plenty of us around.

For a few months after the awful, creepy call in the garden, I felt the sludge of what happened clinging to me. We all dealt with what happened, together, in good and constructive ways that I won’t describe. But I felt unfinished business. Shame. The second-hand stain of a genuinely evil person using another person in an attempt to use me as a weapon against his victim, my friend, a woman who survived and defied erasure.

It was not my shame, or hers, and we refused it. But shame is sticky, especially when it’s inflicted in malice. One night, months later, I sat on my patio, by the lambsquarter, scribbling by firelight in a notebook in an attempt to find myself beneath the sludge. Eventually, I settled on one phrase. I pictured the useful fool, the benevolent patriarch, the sludge man. I said it to him.

What’s mine is mine. What’s yours is yours.
What’s mine is mine. What’s yours is yours.
What’s mine is mine. What’s yours is yours.

To the women of Disobedience. You know who you are.