The sin of silence
The epidemic of denial about sexual abuse in the evangelical church
Illustration by Marina Muun for The Washington Post
By Joshua Pease

Rachael Denhollander�s college-aged abuser began grooming her when she was
7. Each week, as Denhollander left Sunday school at Westwood Baptist
Church in Kalamazoo, Mich., he was there to walk her to her parents�
Bible-study classroom on the other side of the building. He brought
Denhollander gifts and asked her parents for her clothing size so he could
buy her dresses. He was always a little too eager with a hug. The
Denhollanders led one of the church�s ministries out of their home, which
meant the man would visit their house regularly, often encouraging Rachael
to sit on his lap, they recalled.

The man�s behavior caught the attention of a fellow congregant, who
informed Sandy Burdick, a licensed counselor who led the church�s sexual-
abuse support group. Burdick says she warned Denhollander�s parents that
the man was showing classic signs of grooming behavior. They were worried,
but they also feared misreading the situation and falsely accusing an
innocent student, according to Camille Moxon, Denhollander�s mom. So they
turned to their closest friends, their Bible-study group, for support.

The overwhelming response was: You�re overreacting. One family even told
them that their kids could no longer play together, because they didn�t
want to be accused next, Moxon says. Hearing this, Denhollander�s parents
decided that, unless the college student committed an aggressive, sexual
act, there was nothing they could do.

No one knew that, months earlier, he already had.

One night, while sitting in the family�s living room, surrounded by
people, the college student masturbated while Denhollander sat on his lap,
she recalls. It wasn�t until two years later that she was able to
articulate to her parents what had happened. By that point, the student
had left the church. Moxon was furious that her church community hadn�t
listened. But she never told anyone what had happened to Rachael. �We had
already tried once and weren�t believed,� Moxon says. �What was the
point?�

Today, Denhollander can see how her church, which has since shut down,
failed to protect her. But as a child, all she knew from her parents was
that her abuse had made their church mad and that she wasn�t able to play
with some of her friends. She blamed herself � and resolved that, if
anyone else ever abused her, she wouldn�t mention it.

And so when Larry Nassar used his prestige as a doctor for the USA
Gymnastics program to sexually assault Denhollander, she held to her vow.
She wouldn�t put her family through something like that again. Her church
had made it clear: No one believes victims.
Rachael Denhollander wipes away tears at the sentencing of Larry Nassar in
a Lansing, Mich., courtroom on Jan. 24. Denhollander was one of many young
gymnasts sexually abused by the USA Gymnastics team doctor. As a girl, she
also was a victim of abuse by a college-age man at her church. (Matthew
Dae Smith/Lansing State Journal/AP)

Across the United States, evangelical churches are failing to protect
victims of sexual abuse among their members. As the #MeToo movement has
swept into communities of faith, several high-profile leaders have fallen:
Paige Patterson, the president of Southwestern Baptist Theological
Seminary, was forced into early retirement this month after reports that
he�d told a rape victim to forgive her assailant rather than call the
police. Illinois megachurch pastor Bill Hybels similarly retired early
after several women said he�d dispensed lewd comments, unwanted kisses and
invitations to hotel rooms.

So many Christian churches in the United States do so much good �
nourishing the soul, comforting the sick, providing services, counseling
congregants, teaching Jesus�s example, and even working to fight sexual
abuse and harassment. But like in any community of faith, there is also
sin � often silenced, ignored and denied � and it is much more common than
many want to believe. It has often led to failures by evangelicals to
report sexual abuse, respond appropriately to victims and change the
institutional cultures that enabled the abuse in the first place.

Without a centralized theological body, evangelical policies and cultures
vary radically, and while some church leaders have worked to prevent abuse
and harassment, many have not. The causes are manifold: authoritarian
leadership, twisted theology, institutional protection, obliviousness
about the problem and, perhaps most shocking, a diminishment of the trauma
sexual abuse creates � especially surprising in a church culture that
believes strongly in the sanctity of sex. �Sexual abuse is the most
underreported thing � both in and outside the church � that exists,� says
Boz Tchividjian, a grandson of Billy Graham and a former Florida assistant
state attorney.

As a prosecutor, Tchividjian saw dozens of sexual abuse victims harmed by
a church�s response to them. (In one case, a pastor did not report a
sexual offender in his church because the man had repented. The offender
was arrested only after he had abused five more children.) In 2004,
Tchividjian founded the nonprofit organization Godly Response to Abuse in
the Christian Environment (GRACE), which trains Christian institutions in
how to prevent sexual abuse and performs independent investigations when
churches face an abuse crisis. Tchividjian says sexual abuse in
evangelicalism rivals the Catholic Church scandal of the early 2000s.
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Diagnosing the scope of the problem isn�t easy, because there�s no hard
data. The most commonly referenced study shows how difficult it is to find
accurate statistics. In that 2007 report, the three largest insurers of
churches and Christian nonprofits said they received about 260 claims of
sexual abuse against a minor each year. Those figures, though, exclude
groups covered by other insurers, victims older than 18, people whose
cases weren�t disclosed to insurance companies and the many who, like
Denhollander, never came forward. In other words, the research doesn�t
include what is certainly the vast majority of sexual abuse. The sex
advice columnist and LGBT rights advocate Dan Savage, tired of what he
called the hypocrisy of conservatives who believe that gays molest
children, compiled his own list that documents more than 100 instances of
youth pastors around the country who, between 2008 and 2016, were accused
of, arrested for or convicted of sexually abusing minors in a religious
setting.

The problem in collecting data stems, in part, from the loose or
nonexistent hierarchy in evangelicalism. Catholic Church abusers benefited
from an institutional cover-up, but that same bureaucracy enabled
reporters to document a systemic scandal. In contrast, most evangelical
groups prize the autonomy of local congregations, with major institutions
like the Southern Baptist Convention having no authority to enforce a
standard operating procedure among member churches. This means researchers
attempting to study this issue have to comb through publicly available
documents.
Cardinal Bernard Law, pictured in 2005, knew about priests� sexual abuse
of children in the Boston Archdiocese but helped cover it up for years.
The Catholic Church�s hierarchical structure helped hide the abuse but
later provided a bureaucratic record of the scandal. (Joe Raedle/Getty
Images)

That�s what Wade Mullen, the director of the M.Div. program at Capital
Seminary & Graduate School, did as a part of his PhD dissertation. He
collected reports of evangelical pastors or ministers charged with a crime
in order to understand how evangelical organizations respond to crisis.
Over 2016 and 2017, Mullen found 192 instances of a leader from an
influential church or evangelical institution being publicly charged with
sexual crimes involving a minor, including rape, molestation, battery and
child pornography. (This data did not include sexual crimes against an
adult or crimes committed by someone other than a leader.)

His findings help explain a 2014 GRACE report on Bob Jones University, one
of the most visible evangelical colleges in the country. The study showed
that 56 percent of the 381 respondents who reported having knowledge of
the school�s handling of abuse (a group that included current and former
students, as well as employees) believed that BJU conveyed a �blaming and
disparaging� attitude toward victims. Of the 166 people who said they had
been victims of sexual abuse before or during their time at BJU, half said
school officials had actively discouraged them from going to the police.
According to one anonymous respondent, after he finally told the police
about years of sexual abuse by his grandfather, a BJU official admonished
him that �[you] tore your family apart, and that�s your fault,� and �you
love yourself more than you love God.� BJU officials declined to comment
for this article.
After he finally told the police about years of sexual abuse by his
grandfather, a BJU official admonished him that �[you] tore your family
apart, and that�s your fault,� and �you love yourself more than you love
God.�

That same year, 18 volunteers, staff members and interns at the Institute
in Basic Life Principles (including many underage girls) accused its
founder, Bill Gothard, of sexual harassment, molestation and assault.
Gothard had enormous sway over a small but tight-knit collection of
evangelical home-schooling families around the country. One of those
families was the Duggars, stars of a TLC reality television show. Josh
Duggar, the eldest of 19 kids and former executive director of the
conservative Family Research Council�s political action group FRC Action,
lost his job after reports that he molested four of his siblings and a
babysitter as a teenager. For years Duggar�s abuse stayed hidden as his
parents and an Arkansas state trooper � now in prison himself on charges
of child pornography � declined to disclose the crimes. (The suit against
Gothard was dropped. Duggar�s actions are now outside the statute of
limitations. Neither responded to requests for comment.)
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Sovereign Grace Churches (SGC), an influential chain of congregations,
many located on the East Coast, allegedly failed to report sexual abuse
claims during the �80s and �90s to the authorities and caused secondary
trauma to victims through pastoral counseling, according to an extensive
investigation by Washingtonian magazine. In one instance, an SGC pastor
allegedly told a wife whose husband sexually abused their daughter to
remain with him. When she asked how she could possibly stay married to a
man attracted to children, she was told that her husband �was not
attracted to his 11-year-old daughter but rather to the �woman� she �was
becoming.� � Two years into the husband�s prison sentence, SGC pastor Gary
Ricucci wrote in support of his parole using church letterhead, and the
church welcomed him back to the community after his release.

The wife no longer attends. Asked to comment on these episodes, SGC
Executive Director Mark Prater emailed a statement: �We encourage all of
our churches to immediately report any allegations or suspicions of abuse
to criminal and civil authorities, regardless of state law or the passage
of time.� He cited a program implemented in 2014, the �MinistrySafe child
safety system,� that teaches member churches how to deal with reports of
abuse. Ricucci � who, like other local pastors, does not answer to SGC
officials � did not respond to requests for comment.

The evangelical defense of God-fearing offenders extends to the political
realm. Franklin Graham, CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association,
said President Trump�s �grab them by the p�y� comments and other crude
language didn�t matter because �all of us are sinners.� During Roy Moore�s
recent Senate campaign, a poll conducted by JMC Analytics of likely
Alabama voters found that 39 percent of evangelicals were more likely to
vote for Moore after multiple accusations that he�d initiated sexual
contact with teenagers when he was in his 30s. �It comes down to a
question [of] who is more credible in the eyes of the voters � the
candidate or the accuser,� Jerry Falwell Jr., president of the evangelical
Liberty University, said at the time. �. . . And I believe [Moore] is
telling the truth.�
Jerry Falwell, left, president of Liberty University, said he believed
Senate candidate Roy Moore instead of the women who accused him last fall
of sexual misconduct. Moore, right, lost a special election for Senate in
Alabama late last year after several women said he had made sexual
advances toward them when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s.
(Falwell: Alex Wong/Getty Images; Moore: Jabin Botsford/The Washington
Post)

It was the same message 7-year-old Denhollander heard: Stay silent,
because the church won�t believe you.

Why are so many evangelicals (who also devote resources to fighting sex
trafficking or funding shelters for battered women) so dismissive of the
women in their own pews? Roger Canaff, a former New York state prosecutor
who specialized in child sexual abuse, tells me that many worshipers he
encountered felt persecuted by the secular culture around them � and
disinclined to reach out to their persecutors for help in solving
problems. This is the same dynamic that drove a cover-up culture among
ultra-Orthodox communities in New York, where rabbis insisted on dealing
with child abusers internally, according to several analysts.

But among evangelicals, there is an added eschatological component:
According to a 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center, 41 percent of
Americans believe that the end times will occur before 2050. In some
evangelical teachings, a severe moral decay among unbelievers precedes the
rapture of the faithful. Because of this, many evangelicals see the
outside world as both a place in need of God�s love and a corrupt, fallen
place at odds with the church. (�New Secularism is an attempt to undermine
and destroy Christianity,� warned a headline in Christian Today a few
years ago.)
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This attitude could explain the 2017 case of an assistant pastor at Agape
Bible Church in Thornton, Colo., who was convicted and sentenced to 13
years in prison for repeatedly sexually assaulting an adolescent girl. The
police investigation revealed that church leaders and the girl�s father
agreed not to contact the police because the �biblical counseling�
received within the church was sufficient to handle the case. According to
an officer who interviewed the father, �His interest was in protecting the
church and its reputation more than protecting his daughter.�

Partly, church leaders tend to circle the wagons out of arrogance. �I�ve
worked with churches across the theological spectrum, from fundamentalist
to progressive,� Tchividjian says. �They say: �I�m the man God�s placed in
charge. I have the Bible. I know how to handle this.� �

But another, less visible problem is the overall attitude toward sex.
Sexual sin is talked about constantly, and extramarital sex is considered
a heinous moral lapse. (A student at Patterson�s seminary who told him
she�d been date-raped was disciplined for being in the man�s room) It
stands to reason that churches don�t want to air an epidemic of wickedness
among their flocks.

When congregants believe that their church is the greatest good, they lack
the framework to accept that something as awful as sexual abuse could
occur within its walls; it is, in the words of Diane Langberg, a
psychologist with 35 years of experience working with clergy members and
trauma survivors, a �disruption.� In moments of crisis, Christians are
forced to reconcile a cognitive dissonance: How can the church � often
called �the hope of the world� in evangelical circles � also be an
incubator for such evil? �Christians must decide whether to give into the
impulse to minimize the disruption of the abuse, or let themselves see a
serious problem in their community and deal with it,� Langberg says. �It�s
when they find out if they truly believe what they say they believe.�
Rachael Denhollander is interviewed for ABC�s 20/20 in January about her
abuse by Larry Nasser. (G.E. Anderson/ABC/Getty Images)

As an adult, Rachael Denhollander once again found herself at the center
of one of these disruptions. The church she attended, Immanuel Baptist in
Louisville, was actively supporting former SGC president C.J. Mahaney�s
return to ministry. Mahaney had been asked to step down from his role in
2011 because of �various expressions of pride, unentreatability, deceit,
sinful judgment and hypocrisy.� In 2012, a class-action lawsuit held that
eight SGC pastors, including Mahaney, had covered up sexual abuse in the
church. Mahaney and the SGC claimed vindication when a judge dismissed the
lawsuit for eclipsing the statute of limitations. In 2016, Immanuel
Baptist Church repeatedly invited Mahaney to preach at its weekend
services.

Denhollander says she told her church�s leaders this was inappropriate, as
Mahaney had never acknowledged a failure to properly handle allegations of
sexual abuse under his leadership. But the church ignored her, and when
Denhollander went public with accusations against Larry Nassar in the
Indianapolis Star, a pastor accused her of projecting her story onto
Mahaney�s. When she persisted, he told her she should consider finding a
new church. (Maheney did not respond to requests for comment.)

�It is isolating and heartbreaking to sit in a church service where sexual
abuse is being minimized,� Denhollander says. �The damage done [by abuse]
is so deep and so devastating, and a survivor so desperately needs refuge
and security. The question an abuse survivor is asking is �Am I safe?� and
�Do I matter?� And when those in authority mishandle this conversation, it
sends a message of no to both questions.�

At an untold number of Christian churches and institutions, the silence on
sexual abuse is deafening. Statistically, evangelical pastors rarely
mention the issue from the pulpit. According to research from the
evangelical publishing company LifeWay, 64 percent of pastors said they
talk about sexual violence once a year, or even less than that. Pastors
drastically underestimate the number of victims in their congregations; a
majority of them guessed in the survey that 10 percent or less might be
victims. But in 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found
that 1 in 4 women (women make up approximately 55 percent of evangelicals)
and 1 in 9 men have been sexually abused. There is no evidence suggesting
those numbers are lower inside the church.
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Those who do publicly preach on sexual abuse are often stunned by the
response. Kathy Christopher, a pastor to women at Christian Assembly
Church in Los Angeles, first spoke on the topic while sharing the story of
her own abuse. Immediately, fellow survivors opened up about their
experiences, Christopher says. �Sadly, my story was not an unusual story.
It was heartbreaking to see how many people needed to talk about this
trauma in their past.�

When a judge sentenced Nassar for molesting hundreds of young girls,
Denhollander was there; she spoke at length in the courtroom, reminding
Nassar that the Christian concept of forgiveness comes from �repentance,
which requires facing and acknowledging the truth about what you have done
in all of its utter depravity and horror, without mitigation, without
excuse, without acting as if good deeds can erase� it.

It was a word of warning for a community that, writ large, has been
complicit in minimizing or enabling rape, molestation and emotional abuse
within its walls. Denhollander also said that one of the prices she paid
for calling out Nassar was losing her church, referring to her experience
at Immanuel Baptist.

When the pastors there saw Denhollander�s statement, they began to
understand the damage they had done. In a statement released by email this
week, the board said the church had sinned in its treatment of the
Denhollanders and had sought their forgiveness. (Denhollander says she
accepts the apology.) Officials also said that SGC pastors will no longer
be speaking at their church while accusations against them remain
unanswered. �In the last few months God has increased our sensitivity to
the concerns of the abused,� the statement reads. �He has called us to
look at our own shortcomings as pastors. He has allowed us to seek and
receive forgiveness from those we have failed.�

Immanuel Baptist Church faced a choice, the same one before many American
churches today: Face the sin in their midst and make the church a place
that follows the biblical command to care for the powerless and victimized
� or avoid the disruption and churn out another generation of silenced
victims who learn, like Denhollander did, that the church isn�t safe.

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