“I feel like a lure,” she said to me. “Like I’m putting myself out there giving survivors false hope that churches are willing to learn and change.” Then she, a devout Christian, said, “I have literally no hope left that churches are going to change.”
Last week I had a long conversation with a fellow advocate from a partner organization that, like Into Account, specializes in strategic support for survivors who have been abused in Christian environments. We’re almost exactly the same age, and our advocacy careers have had somewhat similar trajectories, but what matters the most to me about our collaboration is how deeply aligned our priorities are.
We’re not in the business of working with survivors of church-based abuse because we want to “restore the church” or “save the church from itself,” despite the frequency with which those intentions are projected onto us. We both got into the work out of a desire to build up survivors’ agency and autonomy in the face of bad institutional responses and bad theology that routinely strip them away.
And we’re both expressing the same thing: that somehow, we ended up spending more time on church processes related to reporting abuse than we ever intended, and we’re not happy about it.
“The things that are supposed to burn me out don’t burn me out,” my colleague said to me.
I knew exactly what she was talking about. The trauma exposure that advocates like her, and like me, experience is somewhat different from that experienced by first responders and those who deal with acute crises. We don’t encounter the immediate aftermath of violence very often. What we navigate instead are its endless institutional iterations.
For example:
Things that are supposed to burn me out:
Hearing horrible stories about rape and child sexual abuse
Interacting with survivors
Being around people crying
Being around people in distress
Blunt misogyny from witless assholes
Not being able to “fix it” or “save everybody”
Things that actually burn me out:
Feeling hope for a church process knowing it will likely fail
Cognitive dissonance from hearing earnest-sounding commitments from institutional leaders, who then directly undermine those commitments through their actions, and inactions
Subtle misogyny from “benevolent” patriarchs
Wanting to trust someone who I know I shouldn’t trust, because lack of trust is exhausting
Trying to avoid being labeled as “difficult” without abandoning myself
Sending moral appeals into what feels like a sucking void
Experiencing thinly veiled lack of care
Watching abuse happen before my eyes in the form of institutional betrayal
Bearing unintentional witness to the unaddressed trauma of church leaders who project their own pain onto inappropriate targets
“I feel like a dupe,” I said to my colleague.
“I feel like a lure,” she said to me. “Like I’m putting myself out there giving survivors false hope that churches are willing to learn and change.” Then she, a devout Christian, said, “I have literally no hope left that churches are going to change.”
CYA for God
The more I talk to other survivors and advocates dealing with church-based abuse, the more I hear a similar refrain: Churches are not getting better at responding to abuse. If anything, they’re getting worse.
Some Christians hate when I make that claim, and understandably so. It’s demoralizing. What about their initiatives? What about their trainings? What about their task forces? What about their reporting systems? What about all the heightened awareness?
So let me be clear about what I’m not saying: I’m not saying that efforts of survivors, both within and outside of churches, have been wasted. At all. As a movement, we’ve learned so much in the past few decades. Our inheritance from our survivor advocacy elders is a rich inheritance.
Still, almost all of my advocacy elders have expressed to me that they spent a long time underestimating the depth and breadth and complexity of the problems.
What churches are getting better at, without a doubt, is covering their asses legally. They’ve learned how to evade responsibility and how to avoid knowing what they don’t want to know. And while it’s true this is happening in all kinds of institutions (liability culture), church institutions justify legal ass-covering with theology. Or, they infuse ass-covering processes with a theological veneer – a particularly insidious practice ripe for spiritual abuse.
“Religious liberty” agenda means zero accountability
At this historical moment, it is practically impossible in the United States to hold any Christian institution accountable for any form of harm (all forms of abuse, not only sexual). Christian nationalists have actualized a version of “religious liberty” that functionally grants Christian institutions carte blanche to abuse and steal autonomy from anyone they deem unworthy of full humanity.
Are mainline Protestant Christian institutions better at responding to abuse than Catholics and evangelicals? Mainline Christians sure seem to think so. But I’m troubled by all the times I’ve seen liberal and even progressive Christians perpetrate abuse and then cover their own asses with the legal blankets that the Christian nationalists have woven. (On a related note, I recommend sociologist Ryan Burge’s statistical deep dive, “There is Almost No ‘Liberalizing Religion’ in the United States.”)
So if all of this that I’ve just shared represents my own analysis of the situation, you might ask, how on earth do I justify spending so much of my time dealing with church processes?
I know how I used to justify it, at least.
Autonomy, Systems
Broadly speaking, my reasons for engaging with church processes boil down to two factors. First of all, honoring survivors’ autonomy means respecting survivors’ choices, and many survivors choose to report their abuse to the organizations under whose watch it occurred. No survivor should face those processes alone, and I’ve often accompanied survivors through them.
The second factor is closely linked to the first, and that is that the legal system–widely perceived by the general population as the solution to sexual violence–sucks.
A non-exhaustive list of inescapable realities in the legal system:
Statutes of limitations for sexual abuse and assault are mostly too short to accommodate successful prosecution or litigation.
Criminal standards of evidence are unattainable for most victims of sexual violence.
Civil options are limited by a dizzying number of factors, not the least of which is capital (both financial and emotional).
The police retraumatize survivors and are demonstrably recalcitrant to investigate sexual violence.
District attorneys and civil litigators routinely turn down sexual assault cases that they aren’t certain they can win.
As community psychologist and sexual assault researcher Rebecca Campbell writes, “The systems hold the power to define the problem, the solution, the processes, and the outcomes” (Campbell, 2024). And because these systems prioritize their own continuation over survivor autonomy, the majority of survivors ultimately find them useless.
The point is that survivors have extremely limited choices, and religious processes often feel more attainable than legal ones. There was a time when, despite my cynicism about church and Christianity, I thought church processes might hold more possibilities for survivors. Churches, I reasoned, could at least be held accountable to their own values.
But my mistake was in assuming that the systems that make up organized Christianity were less self-perpetuating than the legal ones. And I don’t know how much longer I can tolerate engaging with them.
Morality vs. “Robustness”
What do I mean, exactly, by “self-perpetuating” systems? Let me turn again to Campbell:
“As systems grow in power, money, and staff, Sarason (1972) noted they typically do less so they can conserve resources to ensure continuation. One way to manage labor is to have other systems do the work–such as having the medical system collect forensic evidence. Another way to manage resources is to just not do the work–such as not submitting rape kits for DNA testing” (2024).
Let’s try applying this reasoning to church processes.
Reports of sexual violence and other abuses asks Christian organizations to do the labor of moral discernment. To a degree that I suspect would astonish many of their parishoners, churches now outsource much of that labor to insurance companies and legal counsel. I am forever reading about “robust” new policies, presented as evidence that the organization in question has “zero tolerance” for abuse.
I don’t think most laypeople in the pews know the difference between “robust policy” and “survivor-centered policy,” unless they engage with those terms professionally. Without context, both of those things sound pretty decent. Like they could fit well together, right?
In the world of policy design, there is a great deal of wonky literature on what criteria are necessary for “robustness.” My graduate education did not entirely prepare me for the rhetorical gymnastics of this particular body of literature, but my best summary of what it means is “risk minimization across as many possible scenarios as we can imagine.” That meshes with the spirit in which I hear this terminology.
I hate to be a killjoy (I’m lying, I love it), but a policy that minimizes risk for an institution is not a survivor-centered policy. Every organization that claims to be survivor-centered will struggle when a victim of abuse shows up with a narrative that undermines the organization’s narrative about itself. The organization’s approach to that struggle will say a lot about who they are. What if the narrative is, “We’re the kind of church where abuse doesn’t happen,” or, “We’re the kind of church that gets it right?” The risk minimization strategy then is to shift from treating the victim like a human being to treating the victim like an institutional liability.
It’s an ugly shift to watch. I refuse to believe it’s inevitable. No matter how messed up the system is, church leaders still have a choice.
Let’s return for a moment to Campbell, who writes of the legal system:
“This help was defined by system personnel and policymakers, and who created a systems-centered model that centers needs of systems, not survivors” (2024).
This systems-centric approach is happening in churches too, when congregational and denominational policy-makers choose the “robust” policy approach over genuine moral engagement with the truths that survivors carry.
When they bypass real, moral challenges in favor of legal ass-covering, church leaders abandon any real hope of cultural change regarding abuse. And they compound the harm of abuse in the process, because as the professional faithful, they need to have moral justifications for any immoral choices that they can’t hide from public view.
Burnout and hope
I grew up in a mainline-ish Mennonite denomination haunted by generational trauma from its past of patriarchal sectarianism (more on that some other time). Mennonites are known for upholding communal values. That experience has taught me to recognize the rhetorical slight of hand that conflates the most cynical of institutional interests with care for a beloved community. But it also taught me to seek communal solutions for systemic problems. I can’t stop hoping that an individual church process can lead to something better, something that positively impacts more people. That systemic change might, if we do it right, be for something other than the preservation of an existing system.
I carry around that hope in a culture of kleptocracy, exploitation, and lies. I struggle with what feels increasingly like a neoliberal bait-and-switch: the idea that our systems are capable of reform in the direction of democracy and inclusion. I feel betrayed enough by secular, liberal institutions in their failure to protect us from fascism. To quantify the betrayal I feel from the church institutions that have impacted my life with the patterns I describe above? I wouldn’t even know where to begin.
I believe in systemic change. I believe in survivors. But I want to find a better way to do my job, one that doesn’t demand of me an endless supply of conditional, exploitable belief in systems that have done nothing to earn it.
My hope is too precious to be ruined by burnout.
Infinite thanks to my dear friend Sophie Vodvarka, whose encouragement and editing support have been invaluable to me in general and for this post in particular.