Sexual Abuse, by Any Other Name?

When it comes to addressing sexual abuse today, we crave data but avoid dialogue. But if we’re going to tackle the pandemic of abuse, particularly in communities of faith, we need clearer conversation not simply more. Society’s romance with intersectionality is a functional distraction to the Church’s calling to help heal wounds, regardless of their etiology. While the causes of sexual abuse are multifactorial, most wounded are not “coming home.” They have their reasons.

Like standing amid the broken glass and twisted metal of a car wreck, while arguing over how the accident happened, contemporary talk of abuse is too politicized to offer genuine healing. With so many resources, the Church actually has a unique healing role that survivors need. I want to assess the present state of timidity and misdirection that survivors face in the Church. Yes, I’ve lived it.

 

1. We cannot heal what we will not name.

We’ve heard politicians the world over stammering through absurd terms to describe the evil of radical Islamic terrorism. Yet the same pathology exists in faith communities where leaders struggle to call out the evil of sexual abuse. Ignoring 20% of a congregation (1:4 women; 1:6 men) effectively hollows out the courage of many and certainly disregards the need of victims for advocacy, especially children who have no voice. Whether it’s the spinelessness of a politically correct culture, a gritty protection for the powerful or some skewed notion of religious decorum, this sacred silence in our churches dodges a vital principle of healing—accurate naming.

When shepherds name sexual abuse among their flock, it releases a holy disgust for the betrayal of trust, develops a redemptive patience for the process of healing, and ignites a collective empathy that sanctifies profound relational wounds. This kind of naming is not stigmatizing or labeling. The motive and tone are different. Labeling confuses sociology with theology, and isn’t interested in accuracy or applying Christ’s mission to a broken world. Healing requires right names, not safe terms. Right names are well-suited to the nature of psychological, relational, and spiritual triage. Both the abused and non-abused need the tutoring of healing names.

Sexual abuse is radical internal terrorism. Sound familiar? It is a comprehensive wounding, capable of clawing at the soul. Naming is empowering, because it is reality-depicting. Abuse does not need the empty support of “victory theologies” devoid of anthropology or the nervous hush of family members who are desperate for image management. The horrors of abuse reach beyond hashtags into protected systems of power capable of shaping faith and family—without exits.

Leaders must give victims the gift of words. A wise shepherd knows that at any moment they are speaking for an abused child frozen in confusion, a muted adult locked in denial, a molesting father-in-law or 2 in 10 marriages that are suffering the effects childhood sexual abuse. Naming promotes the meaning and compassion that victims are too afraid to ask for. But the lack of supportive naming creates another problem.

 

2. We will not name what we are unwilling to grieve.

If honest naming dignifies the wound, collective grief is a needed salve. Like changing the stigma of depression, corporate acknowledgement helps overturn the profound isolation abuse victims feel. Unfortunately, unwanted experiences translate into unwelcome stories. Is there a will to listen to the abused? In spite of our rhetoric, there is a form of exploitation that happens “in here,” too. This trafficking needs our family care. Such collective grieving for our abused brothers and sisters is an ethic cultivated by leaders who have faced their own pain. Leaders can learn to speak of abuse in their own families—even their abuse—not just cancer, poverty, and racism. Do abused movie actors have a greater warrant to speak of abuse than ministers?

Abuse has an ugly attack-factor that can drain the will-to-help. It’s not a rare contracted illness. Abuse is an active plundering of a fellow image bearer. Add to this the power-plays, incest (80%), spiritual hypocrisy, addictions, and forms of re-victimization and you have a complex relational ecosystem that no single leader is equipped to address. The body of Christ is needed. Today, too many abused are merely “farmed out” to others. How many psychologists understand Paul’s theology of the new citizenship? In the market-driven church, abuse simply doesn’t sell. We’ve forgotten that healing a survivor restores a community.

All this scares even the non-abused. Victims desperately need their spiritual family. But theological healing is the hardest medicine to find. If victims are lost in narratives of anger and an absentee God, faith communities hide behind an aversion to ambiguity and family “cases” they’d rather not face. But the sacrifice of grieving is necessary for a ministry of presence that is willing to sit in the pain of our abused brothers and sisters. For abuse victims, silence is a deafening answer that is further damaging.

When the Church tactfully acknowledges the sexually abused, then healing can be extended beyond the sterile walls of a therapy office. In the Church, collective grief is a nourishing ethic that includes: healing services, anointing, prayer circles, biblical stories, specific liturgy, special sermons, biblical laments, testimonies, responsive readings, dramas, healing rituals, and prayers of healing written by survivors.

I’ve found that most people are willing to enter into the suffering of abuse pain when guided, but they need to be taught how to collectively value this pain within their spiritual family. When April is annually acknowledged as the National Sexual Assault Awareness month; when pastoral prayers name sexual abuse; when survivor testimonies admit their on-going struggles; when sermons unpack biblical texts on sexual violence; when survivors declare their desperate allegiance to God; when policies are updated and volunteers receive training; when support groups are offered for the abused, then a healing environment is activated. Wounded lives are now connected with open grief. Such public venues allow survivors to be seen and heard. Victims have endured enough damage in the dark.

Shared empathy address the disenfranchised grief of sexual abuse. Disenfranchised grief is not intentionally named, publically mourned, ritually incorporated or homiletically engaged. While sexual abuse is 75x more common than pediatric cancer, its lack of address is part of the reason most victims have left the Church. There are plenty of biblical passages leaders could use to validate the experience of survivors. Lament is also the language of victims’ grief, not just sin’s confession. If we are unwilling to lament, then we are unprepared to face the pain that needs it.

 

3. We will not grieve what we are unprepared to redeem.

When it comes to sexual abuse, what is not transformed risks being transferred. It’s a sober reality. A deep form of redeeming is needed. And for the family of the survivor too, the cost of uninspected pain can be high. By redeeming, I’m referring to releasing the survivor from toxic shame, helping them exchange some core experiences, and restoring their dignity and purpose within the life of the Church. Shame is released when the survivor purges the social stereotypes and false messages they’ve carried. Significantly, the collective faith of the spiritual family can buoy the survivor, renewing healthy patterns of behavior, and restoring trust and relational vulnerability. Observe the restoring impact of “their faith” when Jesus responded with healing for the paralytic (Mark 2:5).

The victim’s pain—like the “crime scene”—can defy description: poor prevention measures, betrayed childhood, inadequate policies, transgenerational abuse, colluding family, complex PTSD, and the rhetoric of a sovereign heavenly Father to whom we owe our “bodies as a living sacrifice” (Rom. 12:1). Did you catch any painful ironies? Taken together, these create a gauntlet of obstacles, some of which survivors will struggle with throughout their lives. Yet the grief and care of brothers and sisters is redeeming. When we grieve, we may cry. But when we do “weep with those who weep” (Rom. 12:15), we are grieving a loss. Shunned grief, however, is spiritual hypocrisy. The unhealed victim actually diminishes us all. But with help, a survivor realizes that their violation may have shaped them, but it does not define them.

Society often confuses advocacy for the abused with a vitriolic protest that cares little for the redemptive horizon of faith. With the loss of the transcendent Gospel, all that remains is politics. Without redeeming principles, anger easily morphs into hostile ideologies, and spiritual vitality is simply bartered for toxic blogs peddling more empowerment. Like the Hulk, one can remain angry and avoid commitment. But healing is more than the art of self-announcement. Whenever the script—inside or outside the Church—pushes the victim into center stage and pitches the faith as intolerant, then redemption is paralyzed and God has to walk! Clearly, there are extreme tensions that survivors of faith must navigate. For some, a notion of divine determinism or disembodied theology, is easier to accept. In reality, personal agency and accountability can feel like luxuries for survivors. Obviously, wounded healers are needed in the survivor’s healing journey. As Ray S. Anderson observed:

 

We begin to trust only a person who can share our pain. The sympathy of those who recognize our hurt and wish to help is not sufficient. Those who are vulnerable at the level of their own pain create access to our pain and thus to the very core of our being, without requiring a commitment or promise. Without the existence of shared pain, those who have had trust shattered cannot find a point of beginning.

 

4. We cannot redeem what we prefer to redefine.

There is a growing trend to redefine wounds that are “too messy” for refined faith. Healing abuse can be like recouping a battlefield—some ordinances can be repurposed, but none can be ignored. Unfortunately, identity politics has metastasized into “Victim Olympics.” Society is far more committed to democratizing trauma than finding healing for the ancient evil of sexual victimization.

Now that anyone can attain victim status, real victims are more than muted, and the ethical compass of responsibility has been ditched for a weaponized PC culture. Moral North no longer exists. Sadly, the Church wants to play too, when it redefines incest as a “sad situation,” a “family matter” or mentions nothing at all. One must recall Paul’s words to the Corinthian church about an incidence of incest—“not found even among pagans…Should you not rather have mourned?” (2 Cor. 5:1, 2). The Apostle draws on language from Lev. 18:6-8. Paradoxically, relational wounds actually need relational healing, not professionalized obscurity.

Redefining sexual abuse sabotages healing. The right words are insistent and face reality. According to Stanley Fish, “Language is not a handmaiden to perception, it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert or dead.” The Church can bring a healing vocabulary to its abused people, among whom “no one should wrong or take advantage of a brother or sister” (1 Thess. 4:6).

The Church helps redeem the travesty of sexual abuse when, for example, lament becomes a Christian exhale and believers cry out for their wounded. Because evil is always stronger than isolated individuals, believers are called to remember as a community. Let them cry with their family. These are some practices that healing needs. But redeeming (i.e., sanctifying) a survivor’s experiences is rebuilding their boundaries, helping them not to waste profound suffering, and restoring their true identity in the life of faith. This is the toolshed of the Church.

Naming is dignifying and mending, not isolating. But a culture of trauma craves identity without closure and protest without nurture. So the Church must declare, in advance of its next victim, that they are ready with the full care of Christ, expressed through his Body. The practice of lament, for example, brings fresh metaphors for the frightened and helps heal an evil that is word-shattering. Lament is the language of suffering, and without it, warns Patrick Miller, “Both the lowly and the powerful will be tempted to conclude that the status is quo, that possibilities unseen are inauthentic and unlikely, that the world’s power to define reality is ultimate and unchallenged.”

It is a precious thing to name our most sacred hatreds to God, for our scared Lamb (Rev. 5:6) takes wounds seriously. In our time, abuse requires a “new mourning.” The King who hung naked on a cross, is more offended by sexual abuse than we are. Maybe we should lament that, too.

PR