What happens when we expect everyone participating in institutional life to understand implicitly that no one really means what they say when they talk about things that matter?
“Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right—the feelings of living in a world with Shadow Lands, the feeling that every human misery is someone else’s profit, the feeling of being exhausted by predation and extraction, the feeling that important truths are being hidden. The word for the system driving those feelings starts with c, but if no one taught you how capitalism works, and instead told you it was all about freedom and sunshine and playing by the rules to get the life you deserve, then it’s easy to see how you might confuse it with another c-word: conspiracy.”
Naomi Klein, Doppelganger
On the last day of the Religion and Sexual Abuse conference at University of California-Riverside this past May, the keynote speaker took on a subject I wasn’t expecting at a conference focused on religion: sexual abuse in the California public school system. The speaker, attorney John Manly, is a renowned litigator for survivors of clergy child sexual abuse in the Catholic church, with a long list of notable cases against powerful dioceses, particularly throughout California and New York. He’s also known in the higher ed world for representing hundreds of survivors of Larry Nassar in what became a global settlement with Michigan State University, and survivors of Dr. Robert Anderson in cases against University of Michigan.
His talk in Riverside focused on K-12 cases, however, and the theme throughout was the consistent, baffling failure and hostility of liberal and even progressive politicians—in a state in which they are the dominant political power—when faced with the evidence of the systemic coverup of sex crimes against children in public schools. While California has strong mandatory reporting laws for educators, Manly argued that they’re barely enforced. In Orange County and LA County, he said, he represents primarily kids of color, whose situational vulnerabilities are exploited by predators of all ethnicities.
While he identified himself as generally favorable to labor interests, Manly called out the California teachers’ union for blanket hostility to victims’ claims and accountability reforms. He spoke of Democratic politicians refusing to even speak with victims about key legislation. He was at pains to make sure we—a roomful of feminists and academics— understood that he wasn’t trying to trash Democrats or advocate for a political position. He identified himself as apolitical. Generally, I find the “apolitical” claim nonsensical, but I will grant its utility in some professional contexts; regardless, what he meant by it isn’t really the point here.
The point is that liberal failures when it comes to institutional sexual abuse and coverups are a gift to people whose political project is to gut public institutions and replace them with unregulated private enterprise. Manly drove it home in a way guaranteed to send chills up the spines of that specific audience: he talked about the enthusiasm that a Trump-appointed judge is showing for these cases that Democratic politicians are ignoring.
Manly explained to us, very directly, why people like this judge are excited about this issue. It’s because it gives them a pretext for attacking and dismantling public schools, he said. Under the banner of saving children.
I hate this.
What better pretext for attacking a vital public institution, in these times of conspiracy and confusion and relentless mendacity, than the one that Democratic politicians hand to MAGA on a silver platter?
I hate this. We can easily point out the hypocrisy of MAGA supporters and conservative Republicans who claim to be on the side of child protection. When ICE’s campaign of terror rips apart families across the country; when children being routinely gunned down in classrooms is seen as an acceptable sacrifice to the Second Amendment; when “parents’ rights” groups advocate for the freedom to harm their children in the name of religion; when the Southern Baptist Convention—which probably shapes the agenda of the GOP more than any other single institution—demonizes child victims rather than protecting them; when Christian patriarchy movements traffic their children and call it “marriage;” when Republicans gut Medicaid coverage for children and call it “beautiful”; when trans kids are dehumanized so horrifically that they can’t even use the bathroom in peace; when life-saving childhood vaccine programs are smashed by fools; when the president openly speculates about the real estate prospects of Gaza, presumably once all the Palestinian children have been murdered in this genocidal war—no, whatever this is, it is not for children. What I see is the most aggressively anti-child political project of my lifetime, its goal a society in which white children exist as possessions and reflections of their parents, and Black, brown, and indigenous children exist as resources to exploit for capital.
All this, while claiming to be the saviors of children from sex trafficking perpetrated by global elites. All this, while apparently believing that the justification for their upside-down worldview is lodged somewhere in Jeffrey Epstein’s address book. I’ll come back to that in part two. But for context, I need to take a long detour.
Institutional fatalism
Identifying the hypocrisy of right-wing movements does practically nothing to disrupt the emotional power of their conspiracies. For liberals—particularly white liberals who are relatively comfortable in our corner of this outrageously inequitable world order—that’s difficult information to metabolize.
In Naomi Klein’s 2023 book Doppelganger, which illuminates the motives and mechanisms of the MAGA/Trumpist “mirror world” of disinformation, Klein maps the rise of disinformation against the backdrop of what Marxists generally refer to as late or late-stage capitalism. (A professor of mine once joked that the term was perhaps overly optimistic—Marxist gallows humor.) Klein uses the terms “predation and extraction” to describe the mechanisms by which the vast majority of people on this planet are exploited by a tiny minority of billionaires, oligarchs, and the politicians who serve and enable them.
Throughout Klein’s career, she has investigated how neoliberal economic policies have contributed to draining liberatory discourses of liberatory meaning. She made her name writing about the insidious nature of branding: Martin Luther King’s image in Apple advertising campaigns, anti-war ballads selling shoes made in sweatshops. “For my entire adult life I have been writing about the severing of signs from meaning. I had no idea, though, how far it would go.”
Reading her analysis, for me, has been a strange but real comfort, because it affirms the reality I’ve been struggling with for much of my adult life. I spent my PhD trying to understand how liberal churches have come to function like neoliberal institutions, engaging in elaborate processes for addressing injustice that leave the most marginalized people traumatized and exhausted, the most privileged marinating in a sense of their own victimization, and the status quo marketed as some sort of sacred unity.
I noticed how consistently institutions with lofty stated ideals—both secular and religious—did the exact opposite of what they claimed to be doing, particularly when those ideals involved protecting vulnerable people from discrimination and abuse. So much of what passed for equitable institutional procedure felt like a sucking storm drain of pointlessness, pulling labor and life force from the people who had the least to spare.
The further I got, the more it felt like the pointlessness was the point. In her 2021 book Complaint!, an ethnographic study of sexual harassment complaints in academia, theorist Sara Ahmed discusses the common scenario of survivors in academia being counseled against reporting, in order to avoid the professional cost of being labeled a complainer. “There is a certain kind of fatalism operating here; we might call this a procedural fatalism (‘procedures will be procedures!’) or institutional fatalism ('institutions will be institutions!’). Institutional fatalism tells you that institutions are what they are, such that there is no point in trying to change them.”
What matters
If I were to name the common ground between what I’ve just shared about Klein’s work and what I’ve just shared about Ahmed’s work, it might be this: institutional fatalism is what happens when we expect everyone participating in institutional life to understand implicitly that no one really means what they say when they talk about things that matter.
(A few things that matter: Human thriving. Human dignity. Care for others. Honesty. Integrity. Protection of children. Do these vital concepts already read like they’ve been hollowed out by marketing and dishonest political campaigns? What would it take to remember what these things truly mean?)
The term “gaslighting” has its origins in a depiction of intimate partner violence, and its power and utility in that context is such that I understand why so many people complain about its popular overuse. Its meaning can erode when taken too far outside of intimate spheres. But much like the overuse of “narcissism,” another necessary term in the DV/IPV universe, the ubiquity of “gaslighting” is a reflection of our times that we shouldn’t ignore. Gaslighting, however personal or impersonal, is often what it feels like when procedures are just “being procedures,” and institutions are just “being institutions.”
The Center for Institutional Courage, a nonprofit founded by psychologist Jennifer Freyd (a celebrity in my advocacy circles), describes institutions on their website as “the building blocks of a civil society.” Timothy Snyder counsels us to defend and protect institutions as a bulwark against tyranny and unchecked cruelty. And I believe them. I don’t want to live in a society without functioning institutions. I don’t want public schools to be gutted in the name of child protection by the same political forces that refuse to do anything about children being routinely murdered in their classrooms by weapons of war.
But how do we expect people to respond when the gap between what institutions promise and what they deliver keeps growing? When gaslighting is so normalized as standard institutional practice that no one is ever sure which rules apply to whom, and whether words mean what we think they mean? When no matter how you interpret the policy that is supposedly there to protect you from harm, someone with power can tell you that you’re wrong, and hire a lawyer to gaslight you and intimidate you until you want to die? While people brush you off—or worse yet, try to console you—with “no institution is perfect?”
Opportunistic right-wingers are exploiting these very conditions. Fatalism, disorientation, liberal failure, misappropriating the language of freedom: these are their favorite things. They aspire to build a society in which high-control religious organizations have the means to dictate for all of us who has access to a livable life, and under what conditions we’re allowed to survive.
And their aspirations aren’t new, though they feel that way for a lot of us. For many Americans, this already is, and always has been, what it’s like to live in this country. Patriarchal white men in the U.S. have always had a hell of a lot of power over life and death. (As a friend from Jackson, Mississippi, told me after the 2024 election: Welcome to the South.)
In the U.S., the civil rights movement and its Black leaders especially showed that church-led resistance to Christian nationalism and its patriarchal, white supremacist demands is an irreplaceable piece of our collective resistance to fascism. Not everyone needs to be a Christian (I’m not, to be clear), but we’re all safer and better off if Christians who value our planet, our freedom, and our shared humanity have communities of faith that live into the best of their ideals. I have never not lived and worked alongside Christians for whom I have enormous respect. In a truly democratic society with genuine freedom of religion, there’s all kinds of room for us to work together.
But I work in sexual violence survivor advocacy, and I specialize in church-based abuse. For that reason and a dozen more that intersect with it, I’m worried about liberal churches in general. Not because I think they treat survivors worse than conservative Christians do, but because liberal Christians think they treat survivors better.
Burn it down: in which liberals abandon irony
There’s this thing that some liberal church leaders do. I’ve noticed it over the years, because it transcends denominations. In initial meetings, these leaders revel in telling me how over the whole institutional church thing they are.
I don’t even know why I’m in this position. It just happened.
I’m really here to call bullshit on the whole thing.
I believe in Jesus’s teachings, but I’m not sure I believe in the Church.
Honestly, I’m here to burn it all down.
Burn it down. That one comes back again and again. The most on-the-nose betrayal I’ve ever seen of the revolutionary spirit that this phrase is meant to invoke happened to one of my organization’s survivor clients. Her church, a bunch of rainbow-flag-waving, #BLM-preaching, indigenous land-acknowledging, “we’re a vibrant urban congregation”-spouting, economically privileged, mostly-white liberals, became so vindictive towards her for speaking about the abuse she experienced from a well-liked congregant she had been dating that the leadership called the police on her, claiming she threatened to burn down their church.
The premise for the police call was a second-hand report of a “burn it down” euphemism that one of the survivor’s friends exclaimed in aggravation over the church leadership’s abusive behavior. They didn’t mean it literally, any more than any church leader has meant it literally when they’ve bloviated that phrase in my direction.
Burn it down. The thing we say when whatever system we’re up against is so rigged against our thriving, so fundamentally un-reformable, that the only lasting good we can imagine is in its metaphorical ashes. One could argue that it’s overused, and I don’t think it sits well on the lips of those with institutional power that they’re not willing to risk. But much like “gaslighting,” its place in our common parlance tells us something about how our systems are affecting our collective emotional temperature. Pretending to mistake it for an arson threat was one of the shittier moves I’ve seen in a career of watching church leaders pull shitty moves.
A FOIA request got us the audio of that 911 call, along with the police report. The deacon who made the call was so artless in concealing his motives that the police ended up categorizing their visit as a wellness check on the survivor who was accused. Rather than admit that they tried to weaponize law enforcement against a traumatized person in the most reactionary way imaginable, the church leaders doubled down on gutting the phrase “burn it down” of any metaphorical meaning, insisting, in defiance of logic and evidence, that they were responding to a legitimate threat.
(While that police visit fortunately came to nothing, the traumatic impact of the 911 ambush is ongoing in multiple lives, years later. All that gaslighting produced a lot of gas).
What’s the name for the moral fatalism that arises when a group of people are so terrified of feeling shame at the consequences of their own actions that they organize collectively around a story that at least some of them know, in the murky recesses of their subconscious, is wrong? Projection? Conspiracy? (Sectarianism? Church-building?)
One thing I know for sure: it never happens without shunning. The survivor of this “burn it down” treatment was an earnest, kindhearted person who, like all survivors in crisis, needed her helpers to say what they meant and mean what they said. She had the misfortune of asking for help from fragile, defensive people who viewed accountability as persecution, and thus spent years dealing with rumors that she was a would-be arsonist. Almost no one in her denomination wanted to believe that a fellow liberal church would behave so terribly, because liberal church world needs to at least be better than the reactionary, everything-phobic world of evangelicals. Over there on the right wing, we think, that’s where they burn down people’s lives.
What we don’t know how to know
In attempting to understand the ludicrous theories swirling in the Mirror World, we should be very careful not to be so reactive that we end up saying that sadism and depravity do not happen, that only a loony conspiracy theorist would believe something so out-there. Because an economic order that contains inequalities as extreme as ours —in which the vanity rocket ships of billionaires sail over seas of human misery—is its own kind of depravity, and that level of injustice reproduces more depravity as a matter of course.
The problem is no longer that we do not know these weighty truths—it is that too many of us do not know how to know them. (Klein, Doppelganger)
I’m no longer surprised when I hear about liberal Christians attacking and shunning an inconvenient survivor of sexual and/or domestic violence. If conservatives tend towards excessively conspiratorial worldviews in which all the bad actors come from social categories that they hate, then liberals—particularly white liberals—tend towards naïve faith in reasonableness, in an orderly world in which the correct institutional processes can stave off the forces of political chaos. A lot of liberal perpetrators are excellent at manipulating that naïveté.
And survivors often carry truths that seem too excessive to be real, especially when the perpetrators are close to home. Especially when the perpetrators make their abuse excessive on purpose, to make it less believable.
I’m conscious here of how hard I’m being on liberal Christians, a category that includes many people I respect and love. I’m anxious about being accused of trying to destroy someone’s church. That’s a common enough refrain in work like mine. And the takeover of the U.S. government by Christian nationalist political forces has fueled the existential worries of many liberal churches. They’re not just fretting about being under attack; they are under attack, especially if they’re trying to be a genuine haven for the people most aggressively targeted by this depraved administration. (Another lesson from the civil rights movement: a church building won’t protect you from white supremacists.)
Truly, I don’t want to pile on. This is hard enough. The problem isn’t just that survivors and advocates are asking liberal church leaders to know things that they don’t know how to know. The problem is we’re bearing truths that no one in our society knows how to know.
And we don’t come bearing straightforward solutions. I’ve spent years telling church leaders to seek expertise on sexual violence outside of their own context, or coming in as an outside expert myself because someone else gave that advice and sent them to me. I still advise this, but it usually feels like triage, a short-term mitigating of immediate harm. Outside experts, even the most ethical ones, are always weighing the cost of the truth, and trying to decide how much of it they can afford to tell while still getting paid by organizations full of people who don’t want to hear it. The problem is cultural, societal, systemic. Our hope for changing it involves moral imagination and moral courage, which are hard qualities to outsource when they’re lacking in your own community.
In churches and other settings in which victim advocates operate independently, part of our job is to find out what the organization stands for, and then to help survivors determine if the effort of holding them to their own standards is worth it. When the people who lead organizations hold their standards alongside the unspoken understanding that no one will really test them, accountability feels to them like destruction.
The thing is, if you drag out accountability for long enough—if you stuff it under every rug you can find with lawyers and loopholes and PR consultants who help you hone your bullshit—it destroys you anyway. Your duplicity becomes a badly-kept secret. If your organization claims to stand for something that matters enough to be controversial, its opponents will start smelling your blood. Your bullshit will pave the way for theirs.
(In my understanding of bullshit, I’m indebted to the late philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt, author of the 2005 short classic On Bullshit, in which he writes, “Bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.” Read it and weep.)
Making life hell for survivors and whistleblowers who dare to seek accountability is not helping liberals. It’s not helping in secular institutions like the California public schools, and it’s not helping in the mainline denominations that make up the majority of congregations in what I’ve been calling “liberal church world.” It’s not helping anything, except impunity for perpetrators and liars.
Because people fall into that gap between liberal naïveté and institutional fatalism. Sometimes they fall into despair. Sometimes they fall into the Mirror World, where, as Klein would put it, they get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right.
Part Two coming soon! Also, my deepest thanks to Sophie Vodvarka and Dr. Imani Wadud, both of whom are invaluable to me in friendship as well as in editorial wisdom.