| Dear Ms. Dooley: As a youngster, growing up in the
home of a Southern Baptist minister in Texas, I worked hard to "jump through all the
hoops" which Southern Baptists consider to be essential for young women. Among the
requirements was learning the watchword of the Girls' Auxiliary:
"Knowing that countless people grope in darkness...."
It never entered my mind, until I was forty years old, that the people
"groping in darkness" to whom I would be called to speak would be the leadership
of the SBC. They were the people I considered to be closest to God.
I never considered myself as a radical woman. In fact, I thought my responses to
sexual and domestic violence would be typical of people who talked a wonderful talk about
reaching out to hurting people. Perhaps there are a lot of other people out there who feel
the same as I, but they seem to avoid me like a plague. I guess they know, as I do, that
it is very difficult to stand up and be counted when the numbers are so few. I have been
told that prophetesses are admired from afar. Well, some days it feels like I'm on Mars!
If the SBC is to really get at the heart of the problem of clergy sexual
misconduct, it must first do an about-face. It must start walking in the opposite
direction that it now is proceeding on women's issues. I do not ANTICIPATE this happening,
but I do EXPECT it. My suspicions are that the chasm which has been created in the SBC
over "inerrancy" has been brought primarily because of the fear that women might
gain an equal voice. This has been demonstrated very well in what is going on between
Southern Baptists and Baptist Women (historically known as the Women's Missionary Union).
In 1995, about a year after "How Little We Knew"
(http://www.advocateweb.org/hope/howlittle.htm)
was published, I started doing advocacy writing in SBC circles, bracing myself for some
angry responses from people in high places. To my surprise, the reaction from leadership
was mostly silence. However, I got three responses from Convention leaders "groping
in darkness."
One of them came from a man whose name I had known and respected since childhood:
"Listen," he spoke patronizingly. "I want you to know that I'm no novice at
this business. I've dealt with at least fifty cases!" This horrified me because, from
what he had already said, I knew he had wounded at least fifty victims and left fifty
congregations in shambles. A few minutes later he asked: "Don't you think you are
also partially responsible for what happened to you?" At first, I thought he didn't
know my story, so I attempted to give him the basic facts of my assault by a Southern
Baptist missionary in Africa. He then told me that he considered ALL victims, no matter
what the violation, to be partially responsible. Had he said that five years earlier, I
would have been devastated-but not in 1996. I was outraged by his Dark Age response, and I
told him so. (Months later, after much more dialogue, I believe he gained a respect for
what I was saying; but I'm not naïve enough to believe he really "gets it.")
At that point I picked up the phone and called a lady I consider to be one of the
most knowledgeable on women's issues in the Southern Baptist Convention. To my amazement,
she echoed the sentiments of the man. "I even believe that little children somehow do
something to invite the abuse," she told me. She proceeded to tell me how she had
"resolved" a case which had come to her attention between a young woman and her
pastor. Her response blew the wind out of my sails.
It took a few days to regain my energy. When I did, I placed a call to a clinical
psychologist in the eastern U.S. whom I had been told had treated many victims. She
expressed appreciation for my work. A few days later, however, I received a note saying
(in essence): "Please don't ask me to get involved." (I hadn't.) "I'm too
close to retirement right now, and I want to retire in peace." My guess is she will
have a hard time doing so!
The issues are those of VIOLENCE vs. SAFETY. Sometimes the cases involve outright
physical violence; sometimes they don't. But all involve spiritual violence, which is even
more devastating than physical or emotional violence. Both of these words--VIOLENCE and
SAFETY--are often missing from the works of writers attempting to address the issues. As I
told you on the phone yesterday, I don't think it is safe to be a woman in the Southern
Baptist Convention. Neither is it safe to be a child in many situations. As long as
secrecy is the order of the day, it will never be safe.
I'm not saying it is easy to take a stand. Yet the leadership must be willing to
invest itself heavily in addressing the evil in its own midst at the same time it is
working to address what it considers to be the evils of "the world." What we
have is a split in attitudes and behaviors: aggression against the evils "out
there" and passivity about the internal evils. It must stop, but it will ONLY STOP
WHEN LAITY GET UPSET ENOUGH TO HOLD THEIR LEADERS RESPONSIBLE FOR INCOMPETENCY IN STOPPING
THE GROSS IMMORALITY WITHIN THE PROFESSION.
This is the largest non-Catholic denomination in the world. What an example it
could be! Yet it slides by because of its "escape clause" created by its
structure of autonomous churches. This is a denomination which has the resources to clean
up its act, but it is full of termites, especially in regard to how it treats women.
My prayer is that more and more ministers who are more interested in being pastors
than politicians will find the moral fortitude to join in the tearing down of
infrastructures to get to the real work of the Kingdom-following the example of Christ in
protecting the vulnerable. Shepherds don't devour their sheep. Neither do shepherds stand
by and watch another shepherd devouring sheep. WHERE ARE THE REAL MEN?
Victims of SBC ministers in thirty states have contacted me. Most of these have
never made a report to anyone. They are afraid and rightfully so. Almost fifty percent of
them were abused as minors. Statistics given at the 4th
International Conference on Professional Sexual Misconduct (October, 1998) are that
one out of three victims of clergy are minors. My guess is that the more conservative the
denomination, the higher the percentage of minors and the higher the degree of outright
physical violence will be evidenced. This is certainly true in the hundreds of reports I
have gotten from around the world.
My hope was that the SBC, since they have arrived as the late-comers in stepping
up to bat on these issues, would be willing to learn from the mistakes of their
forerunners in other denominations. So far, I see nothing to give me great hope. The talk,
as was evidenced just last week in the Texas Baptist Standard, is that every effort will
be made to recycle perpetrators under the guise of "wanderers," as opposed to
"predators." The problem is that the people who are saying these things have had
limited formal training in evaluation and treatment of offenders. My guess is they are
getting the information from books or from pastoral counselors who have set themselves up
as "experts" without listening in depth to people like Marie Fortune or working
under direction of people like Gary Schoener or Menninger's Glen Gabbard. The tendency
among clergy to whom I've talked is to try to be pop psychologists who quickly lump the
majority of perpetrators into the category of "wanderer." They do this based on
the fact that they only KNOW of one victim. They do this before a specialist in the field
of professional sexual misconduct has ever had opportunity to do an evaluation. They do
this under the myth that if there were other cases, they would have somehow known about
them, despite the secrecy.
Some have suggested a question to be posed to those encouraging pastors to
"rehabilitate" and churches to "forgive and hire the rehabilitated"
should be: "Would you trust this guy with your wife?"
The question I want them to ask is: "Would every woman in the congregation
(or institution) to which this guy is going, knowing this man's history, be comfortable
with him visiting her in her hospital room three hours after major surgery?" In cases
where the victims have been male, the same question should be asked of the men. If one
person answers "No," then we have a problem because that one woman cannot have
the trusting relationship she deserves with her minister. It's as simple as that.
There is a lot of concern these days for pastors who have been terminated
unfairly. This is a valid concern. We are living in a world permeated by "corporation
thinking," and people in the church are often bringing their issues from the
corporate world into the church and taking their unrealistic expectations and anger out on
the pastor. To be certain, the church is not a very safe place for ministers, either --
especially those in autonomous congregations. I believe this fact is adding to the mix of
confusion in the Southern Baptist Convention.
Yet, in cases of clergy-perpetrated abuse, we must be very clear that the abusers
are not the sheep. Neither are we dealing with a problem of masses of wayward sheep,
falsely-accusing shepherds. This is clearly a problem of False Shepherding.
Dee Miller |
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