Safe to Hope

Season 6: Episode 10 - Rachael Denhollander Expert Contributor

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In this compelling expert segment, attorney and advocate Rachael Denhollander offers deep insight into the role of theology in abuse prevention and response. She helps us understand why survivors struggle to be believed and what it takes to build churches that are safe, discerning, and equipped to care well.

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We value and respect conversations with all our guests. Opinions, viewpoints, and convictions may differ so we encourage our listeners to practice discernment. As well, guests do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of HelpHer. It is our hope that this podcast is a platform for hearing and learning rather than causing division or strife.

Please note, abuse situations have common patterns of behavior, responses, and environments. Any familiarity construed by the listener is of their own opinion and interpretation. Our podcast does not accuse individuals or organizations.

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Ann Maree
Last time On the Safe to Hope podcast, our storyteller Carya shared some extremely difficult circumstances, as if there could be anything much worse than what she had already shared. Specifically though, Carya shared about the children that she had been forced to bear and sometimes lose, whether that was by death or due to not knowing where they are, even today, these circumstances were characteristic to the familial trafficking, sexual assault and ritualistic factors related to her abuse. And to say that they are disturbing details would be an understatement.

This week, I’ve asked Rachael Denhollander, an attorney, educator and author of What Is A Girl Worth, as well as What Is A Little Girl Worth, and What Is A Little Boy Worth, to help our audience understand the nature of reporting these kinds of abuses, the difficulties in doing so, and to help us comprehend the type of atmosphere where atrocities like this evil might occur. Rachael is a recognized leading voice on the topic of sexual abuse, institutional reform and leadership training. She possesses a unique blend of professional skills, personal experiences, and she has a dynamic communication style. Rachael is a sought after media commentator, speaker and consultant, and so we are incredibly grateful she can take the time to talk with us today.

Welcome Rachael.

Rachael
Thank you. It is really a privilege to be here.

Ann Maree
Thank you. And again, I always say this, but it’s our privilege too. I also have had the privilege of working before with Rachael on the Presbyterian Church of America the PCAs study report on Domestic Abuse and Sexual Assault, and that was alongside an amazing group of people who made up the study committee. Rachael has also worked with the SBC, the Southern Baptist Convention, and other denominations, I believe, who are trying to address the abuse crises in their midst, even though a lot of them still aren’t doing very well. But if you’re willing, could you just share a little bit more about the work that you’re doing? I think our audience would love to hear about that.

Rachael
Yeah, absolutely. So I’m an attorney by education. I am licensed in California, and I really consider it a privilege to be able to take a very multifaceted approach to abuse. So I do some legal work, mostly on a referral basis, and I do some litigation work on behalf of survivors with firms around the country. But then also do quite a bit of work in prevention and education and crisis response, and that really spans the most of it actually is in secular contexts. I teach at universities and law schools, our nation’s military academies, medical conferences, domestic violence shelters. And then I do also have the privilege of working in Christian evangelical spaces as well. I did work with the SBC task forces, all three iterations. Had the privilege of working with the PCA. I’ve worked with the acna, non denominational organizations, and really just looking at being able to help people understand, especially in a Christian context, how does our theology inform our understanding of abuse, both in the importance of prevention, but especially in victim care? What is Jesus’s heart for the abused? And if we’re going to say all these wonderful lofty things from the pulpit about the importance of truth and justice and who our God is, and His righteousness and His Holiness. How ought that to inform our understanding of those who have suffered so deeply and so I really I’m very grateful to be in a position where I can pull together all of those backgrounds to really look at how we care well for those who have suffere.

Ann Maree
I love that the How does our theology inform our care? Yeah, very much so. And it should right?

Rachael
It should. It’s our ideas that drive our actions right. And so much of prevention and response is action focused, that if we don’t look at the ideas that drive our actions, you can have the best policy in the world on paper, but you’re not going to understand it, and you’re not going to have the motivation to have the motivation to follow it, and you’re not going to have the heart attitude towards those who have suffered. And so really being able to look at ideas and the implications of our ideas, and of course, in the Christian space, that’s our convictions, our theology, what do we believe? And then how should we act because of what we believe?

Ann Maree
Yeah, thank you. That’ll be very important, even for our discussion here today, I know you and I are probably both in the same boat. We love our theology, but we also want to see that practice be informed by our what we know. And particularly, I think, for these very difficult and unique I mean, not frequent cases like the one we’re talking about today, given that it is kind of something we don’t list we don’t hear very often, it’s going to be very interesting to hear what you have to say about theology as it relates to this particular topic. But even having said that, like there’s several things going on in this story. And so one of the reasons I even wanted to talk to you in particular about this is because it was so multifaceted. And I’m sure you’ve heard things in the years that you’ve been doing the work that you’ve been doing, and so I just really want to hear not, you know, your head, but your heart, about victims like Carya. And just even having said that, I guess that would lead into my first question. Why don’t we in the church, especially hear about some of these things, and I mean all of them, like trafficking, incest, familial trafficking, ritualistic, all of the things, anything you want to answer would be great.

Rachael
I think there are a lot of layers to why we don’t hear about it in the church space and sexual abuse is one of those things that crosses every socioeconomic barrier, right? It’s not unique to any particular group, but why we mishandle it, or why we don’t hear about it, or why we’re not a safe place to disclose, that does change a little bit. There are different flavors for why. And I think in the evangelical spaces, a lot of what we often see really is that it is our theology, it’s misunderstanding our theology that gets us to that place. We have a theology of sexuality, oftentimes in evangelical spaces, that says women are the means to sexual fulfillment that views women, first and foremost by their sexuality. Either women are a danger to a godly man, or they are the means to a godly man’s sexual purity, as Mark Driscoll once very infamously put it, they make a very nice home for penises, right? Or, as some very popular authors who write ostensibly on purity, say a woman is a methadone like fix to a man’s sexual urges, right? So we have taught a very pornified view of sexuality, and what that really does is create a situation where, when you are used to looking at women like sexual objects, it does not ring alarm bells for you like it should when a woman is treated like a sexual object. When you meaning men, leaders have adopted a pornographic view of sexuality, where it is a physical act that exists primarily for them. There’s not a lot of understanding for the depth of sexual damage. They actually don’t hold a biblical view of sexuality, and so there’s not a lot of understanding for the depth of the damage that comes from sexual assault.

Bill Gothard training material is an excellent example of this. Gothard had an entire section in his book on sexual abuse and what to do if you were sexually abused. And in this material he drew, he drew concentric circles, and the innermost circle was your spirit, and then there was your body, and there were these other layers of what ostensibly makes you, makes you. And what Gothard said is your body is the least important part, and what did your abuser do? Your abuser only touched your body. So what you need to do is thank God for the abuse, and thank God that it was the most because if you really have faith, if you really trust that God is good, then you will actually thank him for the abuse, and you will also be thankful that you suffered the least damaging kind of abuse because it was only your body, right? That is because we have generations of men who have adopted a pornographic view of sexuality. They are themselves acting and teaching sexuality in a pornographic framework. It’s purely physical, and it exists for me. And so there is no comprehension of why sexual assault is so damaging, because it’s the women who understand that intimacy is sacred and that it’s so much more than body parts touching. And so the depth of the damage for sexual abuse victims is so deep, because they actually have a more biblical understanding of sexuality, but we have generations of men that don’t. And so right at the outset, we have handicapped ourselves for entire generations for having understanding the depth of abuse and being able to see it when it occurs, because we’ve taught generations of people to look at women like sexual objects, and so it should be no surprise when they’re not bothered when women are treated like sexual objects. That’s how we told them to treat them.

And then we also have very imbalanced understandings of submission and authority in church spaces where things like whistleblowing or telling the truth are seen as divisive, they’re seen as unsubmissive. A woman who says, “This is what’s happening to me at home.” We’ve created a version of marriage and of submission that says, “well, the fix to that is for you to become more submissive.” Right? Again, we have, we have an example that we see with John Piper, a very prominent theologian who speaks on marriage regularly. Piper was asked at one point in time, what do you do with a man who is abusive? And Piper’s response was, Well, it depends on what we’re talking about. If he’s only hitting her, she might need to endure being smacked around a time or two, but if he’s asking her to sin, and this is where Piper signals that a woman sinning is worse than a woman being beaten. If he’s asking her to sin, well, then we have to look at how we deal with that. And the example that he picked, that he pulled out of a hat, was a husband who is asking his wife to engage in a threesome. And Piper’s response to that scenario that he picked was that the wife needed to be very submissive in how she appealed to her husband. She needed to come to her husband and say, “Honey, I want to satisfy you sexually. I understand that that’s my role, and that that’s what God has called me to, and I want to do what God has called me to do, but I can’t do a threesome because that would be sin. Is there something else that you could ask me to do, to satisfy you,” completely bypassing the reality that if you have a husband who’s asking his wife for a threesome, we have an entire level of deviancy that’s not being addressed. And the wife being submissive and asking if there are other favors she can do, does not fix this problem and but in Piper’s framework, in Piper’s instruction and his understanding of marriage, a woman sinning is less is more important than a woman being beaten, and a woman’s response to being asked to sin is to become more sexually submissive to her husband. Right? We have an entire generation, generations of men that are been raised on this framework for marriage and for theology. And so when a woman comes and says, “This is what’s happening to me,” their automatic response is pay attention to your own sin and become more submissive. And a misunderstanding and a misapplication of the idea that you will win your husband through your submission. Okay? And then in addition to that, we have this misunderstanding of authority as well, because Piper’s follow up to that. And again, this is an excellent example Piper’s follow up to that, he was pushed for years and years to say, hey, you never said anything about reporting to the police if she’s being beaten, if there’s something criminal going on, you got to at least say something about reporting to the police. And so Piper about four. Years later, finally clarified, but this was his clarification. He said, she may need to report to the police because is she is supposed to be in submission to her authorities. And the civil authorities have said her husband’s not allowed to beat her, and so if she doesn’t report to the authorities, then she’s not in submission to what the law actually says. Her entire ability to appeal for help, for safety, for security, was not grounded in the fact that she was made a Imago Dei. It was grounded in her status as the submissive. So we have generations of men that have adopted and been explicitly taught and women pornographic views of sexuality and massively imbalanced ideas of understanding of submission and authority, and what that looks like in the marriage and the church context. So we have created the perfect opportunity, the perfect culture, for men to be able to abuse with impunity, for leaders to not recognize or understand what they’re seeing when it’s right in front of them, and then we’ve stamped it and said this is God’s idea of what it’s supposed to look like. And we wonder why rates of abuse are so high in the churches.

Ann Maree
Yeah, you just kind of put feet on something that Dr Heather Evans said a couple months ago when we interviewed her, and I won’t say it exactly how she said it, but it was basically, if you have a porn problem, which what you’re describing is, like the church kind of porn problem. It’s, you know, our own unique variety of porn, if you will. But if you have a problem like that, you have a sex trafficking problem in your church, because that’s what feeds the trafficking industry.

So speak to me a little bit more, and we’re going to get to some of these questions more pointedly about the church and the atmosphere that creates that. And I think you’ve just, you know, given us the foundation for that, but speak to me a little bit more about trafficking, familial especially, and trafficking that you know of in the church.

Rachael
So I think this is one of the areas where we have, we have all these cultural threshold problems that prevent us from understanding abuse and seeing it when it’s there, and then there’s this entire subculture. There’s what we what we think of as sexual abuse, and then there’s this entire level of deviancy with trafficking that is like a foreign world to most people. They’ve never encountered it. They’ve been sheltered and shielded from it their entire life. They’ve been given caricatures of what it looks like, and so that the idea that it’s real is as foreign to them as reading a book about dragons, right? Sex trafficking is as fantastic of an idea as reading a fantasy novel would be, right? It’s just not real. It just doesn’t happen. They’ve never had to encounter it. And the bits and pieces that they have encountered, they fit the perfect stereotype that we’re told trafficking is. And again, I think you see this a little bit in the movie, Sound of Freedom, beautiful movie, in a lot of ways. I appreciate what it was, what was trying to be done in that movie. But what they did was they took all of our inner ideas of what trafficking looks like, and they put it on screen in front of us. It was a nice white little white girl from a nice suburban, white Christian home that gets kidnapped and sold on the black market. And that happens, but the vast majority of trafficking doesn’t look like that, and the vast majority of trafficking victims don’t look like that, right? And so when that’s our conception of trafficking, it’s almost impossible to see red flags or warning signs, right? And some of this, again, is our conditioning. We’re immediately taught to look at the pornography industry and adult entertainment and go ‘that harlot,’ ‘that whore,’ ‘that loose woman,’ when the reality is, what data shows us is that the first age that a woman in the sex industry has as her first sexual experience, the average age of her first sexual experience is age 12 or younger. That’s not a whore or harlot, that’s a trafficking victim who has grown up in a system that she can’t escape. Right? We don’t understand generational trauma, we don’t understand systemic abuse, we don’t understand abuse dynamics, and so we are completely handicapped from seeing it when it’s right in front of us, and then so much of the time, what we again, what we think of as trafficking is this little child being sold on a black market for this amount of money. And again, sometimes that happens, but oftentimes there’s not even necessarily an exchange of money. From a legal standpoint, trafficking means that there’s an exchange of money, but a lot of times, what we’re really looking at is highly organized and ritualistic abuse, and we tend to call that trafficking, because it’s organized, but there’s not necessarily money changing hands so much as a group of very deviant, very evil people with an organized network that are using children and women within that network.

Ann Maree
And that just gives me chills down my spine, it’s not illegal then, well, I guess it’s illegal as child abuse.

Rachael
It’s illegal, but it often doesn’t fall under trafficking. And a lot of the women that I have worked with that have been in those situations, they because there’s no knowledge as to whether or not money changed hands. Maybe it did, and we just don’t know about it. But a lot of times it doesn’t necessarily look like it did. It might be other favors, or again, it might just be a very highly organized network of very evil people. And so they don’t fit under federal trafficking statutes or state trafficking statutes. And so some of those added layers of protection, statute limitations being pulled back, some of the things that we have done to try to make it to try to make the justice system more accessible for trafficking survivors, actually don’t apply to these women, because as far as we can tell, no money ever changed hands. It’s highly organized. It’s systemic. It’s groups of people working together. There might be some level of quid pro quo. Maybe there was some money changing hands, but it’s not trafficking the way we’re taught to think of it in this neat little box, and it doesn’t fit the legal definition of trafficking, unless we can show that there is a direct exchange of money for this person.

Ann Maree
Wow, just another level in this whole discussion that I’ve had this with this particular storyteller, of so many things that are not illegal, like the ritualistic piece is not illegal. You know, if it’s satanic, worshiping satan is not illegal there? Yeah, you could tell the devil’s hands are in it. I just from all of the nuances that are debilitating for the victims if they try to come out. So I think you’ve pretty much answered, why aren’t people willing to believe this kind of stuff. But is there anything else that you would say to that?

Rachael
I think it’s a very difficult thing to hear, right? It’s, it’s very, again, very fantastic, right? It doesn’t fit our ideas of what it looks like. We don’t want to believe that this kind of evil is even possible. It sounds like it comes out of a Frank Peretti novel. And so when we hear these things, if we hear them at all, and oftentimes we don’t hear them unless we have done a great deal of work to signal to survivors that we’re safe. If we hear those stories, we immediately go to that can’t be possible. It’s just not possible, that it’s possible, and that’s as much of a self protective mechanism, I think, as it is anything else now and then and then the other aspect of that is these cases are incredibly difficult to process. When you have extremely severe, complex trauma, oftentimes your memory is very fragmented. These networks are highly organized, so a lot of these survivors have been kept very isolated. And so they might have a vague idea of I was in this kind of place at this kind of time, but it’s not like they can often sit down, some of them can, but a lot of them can’t sit down and say, on this day I was taken here, and it was supposed to be for this conference, but then I was taken here, and this is what happened. The memories are fragmented, and if we don’t understand memory retention and trauma and memory fragmentation and dissociative identity disorder, if we don’t understand those things, we’ll hear that narrative and go, can we said this, but I didn’t find this part here, and then this part didn’t quite line up, and the timeline is not so that you must be making it up, or you must not be remembering correctly, right? And so we don’t understand the things that we need to understand about the neurobiology of trauma and how brains work and how memories work, and that handicaps us from being able to recognize when we have the difference between not possible and sounds impossible, but actually it’s possible.

Ann Maree
Yeah. Again, Dr Gingrich was on, actually, she’s coming on soon, and she’s even using those things as evidences that the abuse has happened. That’s one of the evidences.

Rachael

Yep, and there are first world countries where dissociative identity disorder is actually used as evidence that severe trauma has occurred. Now, it can’t prove what kind of severe trauma, but a D.I.D diagnosis in some places is actually considered evidence that there has been a level of severe enough trauma to cause that neurobiological split in the brain, right?

Ann Maree
And so for our audience that may not have heard any of the episodes yet on d.i.D, that’s dissociative identity disorder, and it’s a fracturing of the person in a way, and that’s just, that’s not even that’s a very layman’s way of saying it, but it will appear at times, very bizarre and when you’re talking with a person.

So let’s take that little bit of a turn and ask the question, why does it seem like churches breed this kind of stuff? And again, I think you’ve answered some of this already, but it’s not like they just allow it. It’s like they breed it. Talk to me a little bit about that.

Rachael
So again, just at the threshold level for quote, unquote, normal sexual abuse. And when I say that, I don’t mean that at all in any kind of minimizing way, but just the type of abuse that people can wrap their minds around a little bit more. One of the things that we do know is that perpetrators are highly intelligent. The more intelligent the perpetrator, the more victims they have, and that they do seek out faith based communities. Psychologist Ann Salter, leading expert in the psychology of sexual abusers, found when she sat down with those who are abusive, that over 90% of sexual abusers identified as religious or very religious, over 90% and that the vast majority of them confess to intentionally targeting faith based communities because they are communities that are often very hierarchical in nature. They have a lot of those theologies that we’ve talked about already that make them very ripe communities to be able to abuse, and because they’re communities that are easy to manipulate, they can blend very well. They can use all of the theological ideas. They can use concepts of repentance and justification. They can give Christians what they want to see, this beautiful redemptive story packaged in a sparkly little bow that we can all raise our hands and say, Praise Jesus. Look at this sinner who’s come home. Right? They know how to use those belief systems to be able to not just, not just gain access to the victims themselves, but to create a community around them that is going to circle around the perpetrator and not believe the survivor or push against the survivor. Abusers don’t just manipulate the people they abuse, they manipulate the communities that surround them. They look for communities that are uniquely vulnerable to manipulation. And we do know, based on the data, that religious communities, evangelical communities, are communities that abusers target for those reasons. We are uniquely susceptible.

Ann Maree
Yeah, very much. So all the things forgiveness and, like you said, the prodigal son coming home, I’m going to skip ahead to a clip I was going to play a little bit later, but you just touched on it. So let me just play this real quick. It’ll take a second to key up, and then I have a question for you.

Carya Recording
We need to know that the false teachers that God warned us would come into our churches can’t always be sniffed out by what they claim to believe. Sometimes false teachers doctrine is as pure as snow. Sometimes they tick all of our cultural Christian boxes. Sometimes they seem so much like us. Sometimes false teachers are merely deceived, but sometimes they deceive, sometimes they serve their father, the devil.

Ann Maree
And so the question I want to ask then, is there a difference between a leader who is a true shepherd, who falls into sin, who fall and that’s a terrible way of saying it. But who falls, who sins and the one who is the wolf in sheep’s clothing? This is a little chilling. You said it, and I’ve heard this from obviously our storyteller, that they’re they look they’re intelligent, they look like us. Tell me, how do you know the difference? Or if you even know?

Rachael
Yeah, so I do think that’s something that’s really difficult. And again, we see this in Scripture, but we’re not taking our own Bible seriously. One of the most terrifying verses in Scripture, to me is where Jesus is talking about what’s going to happen at the gates of heaven. And he’s going to say, “there are many who are going to come to me and they’re going to say, Lord, Lord, did I not in your name?” And then they’re going to list all the things they did in Jesus’s name right up to, “did I not perform miracles? Did I not do all these incredible things in your name? And I’m going to say, ‘Depart from me. I never knew you.’” What that ought to tell us is that there are people out there who are using Jesus’s name and his and his teachings and his theology, and they’re doing things that we would look at and we say those are good things. They’re doing things that might even look miraculous or divine, and yet they’re not known by him. And the other thing that we see in Scripture when they talk about a wolf, when Jesus talks about a wolf in sheep’s clothing, is the entire point of that passage is, they look like a sheep. They talk like a sheep. They sound like a sheep. They’re doing sheepy things. They look like a sheep, right? And so most of the time we use that passage of say, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. That’s that radical feminist over there who’s an atheist? No, that’s not a wolf in sheep’s clothing. That’s just somebody who’s not a Christian. No, a wolf in sheep’s clothing is somebody who’s in our pasture and who sounds like us and who looks like us, and when it’s dark, they’re devouring the sheep, right? And we don’t take that seriously whenever we see a pastor that has fallen. And or a leader where it’s like, oh, you know that fruit doesn’t smell quite right. But man, look at all these other good things, Lord, Lord, did I not in your name? Right? Look at all these other good things. Yes, Lord, Lord, did I not in your name. Of course, there are other good things coming out of this pastor or this teacher or this leader, and what we really have to start taking seriously is the idea that you’ll know them by their fruit, right? And because the fruit is there. Now sometimes, especially in these types of cases, it does take a while to get to it. It’s hard to get to it, especially when we’re talking about ritualistic abuse, because survivors don’t have a safe place to speak up. And it is very difficult to prove all of those things are true. But a lot of times with these guys, there are other red flags. There’s really abusive models of spiritual authority being taught in that church. There’s a lack of any kind of real accountability. There’s very twisted ideas of sexual, sexuality and marriage coming out of this. There is so much fruit at the surface that we see that we go, that’s rotten, that’s not right. And sometimes that can be a red flag that there’s more under the surface, that it’s deeper than what we can even see, right? But we have got to start taking those passages seriously, because those passages that have bought a wolf in sheep’s clothing, they get lobbed towards people that aren’t Christians or individuals that we just don’t like, when the reality is that what Scripture tells us is those wolves in sheep’s clothing, they’re going to look like a sheep, they’re going to sound like a sheep. They’re going to talk like a sheep. They’re going to do sheepy things and say sheepy things, ‘Lord, Lord, did I not in your name’ and the reality is that they are devouring the sheep at night. And so we need to take that very seriously and start asking that question of, okay, well, how do we actually know? And when we see rotten fruit coming out of a movement or a teaching, we need to ask some really difficult questions about that. The conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention, I think, is one of those places there are many, many, many leaders of the conservative resurgence that are either now known to themselves be sexual abusers like Paul Pressler or who routinely covered up sexual and domestic violence, mishandled it in their churches and in their seminaries. That ought to be a red flag for us. That ought to be something that makes us go, what is the actual fruit of these teachers and these movements, and how do we know where we’ve gone from a pastor who sins because we all do, all of us sin, and somebody who’s going to say, ‘Lord, Lord, did I not’, or somebody who’s going to look and sound like a sheep, but they are using their sheepness to devour the flock at night. They are using their authority abusively, and we do see that happening on a very frequent basis with these men and in these movements, and we brush off all of the ugly things that we see coming out, all of the ways that they talk about women that are off color, all of the ways that they handle domestic and sexual violence in their churches and in their seminaries. Then, ‘oh, but they’ve done so many other good things.’ Yes, they have, ‘Lord, Lord, did I not in your name?’ Of course they have. And we don’t take our own Bible seriously, so we’re not ready to see it when it’s staring us in the face.

Ann Maree
Yeah. I don’t even know what to say after that. I’m I want to ask this question about what makes what or how can churches be places that don’t tolerate that. But before we move on to that question, just one more thought, if this is what we know, if we do find this out, if the fruit reveals them, is this disqualifying? What are what are your thoughts as for a pastor, is it a disqualification, or is there reconciliation? Go ahead.

Rachael
When you say this, are you talking about a pastor that’s abused, sexually abused, or a pastor that has not handled it well?

Ann Maree
Well, obviously, if he’s abused, this is a crime, right?

Rachael
100%

Ann Maree
Yeah, so I would be more inclined to think in terms of the one who didn’t. Maybe he groomed a congregant, and it fell short of actual assault, but was found out or that, like you said, the ones who enable... the enablers. I mean, that’s for me. That’s my soapbox. These days, the enablers are just as guilty, in my opinion. But I want to hear what you have to say.

Rachael
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I think, I think we’ve got a couple of different categories that we’re working with and that question, right? We’ve got abusers, and then we’ve got groomers. I think both of those are automatically and immediately disqualified. I think we see that in Scripture and overseers to be above reproach. They are to be living holy. They are to be protectors. Right, a flickering flame, they will not diminish a broken wick. They will not broken...a bruised reed, they will not break right? They are meant to surround the. Vulnerable and to hold them and to be safety and refuge and a tangible representation of Jesus’s security on Earth. If they are not doing those things, they are disqualified. That’s what Scripture tells us. So yes, absolutely.

And then we have this question about, what about people that didn’t handle disclosures, right? And again, I think we have some different categories in there, right? We have people that were actively part of the problem, actively silencing survivors, that are actively shielding abusers and doing it with a level that you look at and you go, you know, maybe you didn’t know, but there’s really no justification for you not knowing, right? And they are persisting in that. And then there are others that I have encountered that have the ‘dear God in heaven, what did I do?’ moment. And I think we can see a few examples of these leaders. I think Vince Vitale from our RZIM International Ministries is a beautiful example of this, where he was part of an organization that was very abusive, and that was sheltering an abuser. And there were places where Vince goes, “I didn’t ask the questions I should have asked. I said things I shouldn’t have said. I didn’t know what I should have known.” And he sat in the brokenness of that and the repentance of that, and then he spent time pulling back from public ministry to begin to act restoratively towards those he had harmed, to sit in the grief, to fully repent, to learn to put his time, his money, his effort, his resources, into growing and demonstrating biblical repentance and restitution. That type of leader, I think, is the best kind of leader, because they have actually demonstrated through their actions, through a protracted process of humility and repentance and restoration, putting their money where their mouth is for lack of a better descriptor. But those types of leaders are very rare, and so I think, I think one of the biggest things that we have to be able to start learning to differentiate when it comes to people that didn’t do what they should have done when they heard a disclosure. And there’s a lot of that are those individuals that have their hearts attuned to God, that are seeing the vulnerable the way God sees them, that are sitting in the grief and in the genuine repentance and taking concrete steps towards restoration and restitution, that are recognizing their need to learn and grow before re entering public ministry. Are they doing all the things that are genuine biblical hallmarks of repentance and restitution? Some of them are. In those cases, I don’t think it’s disqualifying. I actually think they become some of the best leaders in those cases.

Most of them, however, go, “Not me. Not my fault, not my problem. Didn’t know, couldn’t have done it. Why are you picking on me?” That’s not repentance, that’s not humble leadership, that’s not leadership at all, that’s not practicing anything that’s preached from the pulpit. And whether or not it’s this issue or another issue, that’s a heart attitude that I believe fails to meet the biblical standards of eldership, whether it’s over sexual abuse or something else. And any and again, I think people go, why are you just picking on sexual abuse? Well, if a leader is in this pattern of using their authority improperly, whether or not it’s sexual abuse, they’re still using their leadership, their authority sinfully. That’s a problem. That’s sinful. That’s not what Jesus has said an overseer is to be. And if we would just start there, then we would get to all the other places that we need to get to. How we understand biblical authority, what it’s for, how it’s supposed to be used, the limits on it. I think that’s actually a really important threshold issue, because if we would start there, I think we find a lot more disqualification, even that isn’t necessarily tied to the question of sexual abuse, because we’d be looking at the biblical qualifications for leadership and taking them seriously rather than just doing a genitalia check before somebody gets in the pulpit.

Ann Maree
Amen, preach it. Well, there is, I think, one more category we’re going to think about here because of our storyteller. I’m going to play the clip that she’s described that category, and then we’ll get to the question about safe places, because we need to get to that question. Let me play this next one.

Carya Recording
This part of the story is also important for the church to hear. My dad pretended to be a Christian for many years, as I’ve discussed, and he used the church as a cover and a location for his assaults on the things that God loves. The power and control he sought were against God’s people. But he did not lust for positional power within the structure of the church. His role and appetite were to destroy goodness and strengthen wickedness. He sought out others with similar predilections and drew them deeper into the world he lived in. He made everything he touched worse than it was before he started. The men who became the central figures in my life after I left home had different roles. They also pretended to be Christians, but most of them worked to undermine the church by leading it, and they sought power and control within it. These men, servants of Satan, hid not among the flock, but up in front of it, disguised by shepherd’s cloaks.

Ann Maree
Okay, so I was going to ask, are there church leaders like this? But we know there are, and I would just like to hear from you. What do you know about these kind of church leaders, pastors and elders, who are deliberately perpetrators, but who also seek leadership in our vulnerable churches in order to exploit and abuse?

Rachael
Yeah, again, I think that’s a reality we really haven’t wanted to grapple with, either theologically or emotionally, because most of the time, what we do is we look at what the sheep sounds like, and we go, oh, that’s us. That’s a sheep. And that’s just happens to be a sheep. That’s an authority. He talks like a sheep, he looks like a sheep. He does sheepy things, right?

But in reality, it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and they are devouring the sheep. And so again, we’re not looking oftentimes at the overall fruit of the person’s ministry. How are they using authority? How are they in their home? Not always, but often, if we were to look seriously at those types of things there are plenty of things that we see on the surface that are ungodly uses of authority, that lack a humble heart, that are spiritually abusive, that are emotionally abusive, not always, but often, we see those things. And what we typically do in the church space is we either say, “well, but he did all these other good things.” Yes, ‘Lord, Lord did. I not in your name,’ of course he did. Or we say, “you know, oh, they’re on a journey,” right? We don’t understand the difference between somebody who sins and somebody who’s an abuser, a pattern of unrepentant, abusive sin, misuse of power in any context, right? Or we look at it and we just we minimize it, we kind of categorize it off as something else, right? That’s a place where they just need to grow, or maybe it’s a pattern of spiritual abuse. And so we kind of bracket it off, and we actually hold leaders to a less high standard than we would hold anybody else to, and because we’re not even willing to do an honest assessment of the threshold questions. We don’t even get to seeing what might be going on underneath the surface, but we really have to start a gaining knowledge about these realities, right? And I think opening people’s eyes and minds to the underbelly of what can be going on. You know, again, there’s layers, there’s the quote, unquote normal sexual abuse that we see in families and in churches. And we don’t even want to see that. We bury our heads in the sand over that. So of course, we’re not going to see this incredible underbelly of deviance that’s existing in some places, in the organization and the trafficking aspects and the ritualistic aspects. We never even get to look at those because we can’t even comprehend a clergyman who’s assaulting somebody in a counseling session. We don’t even want to see the quote, unquote normal abuse, right? So we have to start grappling with the realities of these things, becoming educated and informed and knowledgeable enough about dynamics of abuse and the reality of organized abuse and trafficking, and how memories work and the neurobiology of trauma, we have to understand those things well enough so that we have a chance of actually seeing it when it’s in front of us. Understanding narcissism, taking our own Bible seriously, starting to really grapple with the question of, what does it mean to be somebody who stands up at heaven and says, Did I not do all these things in your name? I did all of these things that were good and that even looked like they were divinely appointed, and that looked like they were coming from you, that were potentially even miraculous, I did all these things. Didn’t I do them in your name? And the reality of what does it mean for somebody to look like a sheep and talk like a sheep and sound like a sheep and say all the sheepy things and do all the sheepy things as a cover for being a wolf. What does that actually mean, and what does that look like? We don’t want to emotionally grapple with that reality, because it would require so much out of us to do it, and it’s scary, because if that’s really going on, then we have the potential to be vulnerable too. It is so much easier, and it costs so much less to just say that’s not possible. They must be crazy, right? And to close our eyes to that reality, and until we’re willing to even consider it and to become educated on it, we’re never going to be able to hope to see it or catch it or stop it.

Ann Maree
Which is actually one of the reasons our storyteller wanted to go public and tell her story. I mean, where else are you going to hear and maybe you can add. Where else do we get educated on this kind of thing? Do you have any

Rachael
Yeah, so there are some individuals who have done quite a bit of work on ritualistic abuse and just dynamics of abuse. I think for a lot of the threshold issues of, how do we understand what power is supposed to look. Like, how do we understand narcissism? What kind of red flag should we be looking for? A lot of Diane Langberg’s work on power and authority and what a healthy church ought to be is beautiful and theologically rich, and just starts giving us those categories. We have to again. We have to take the categories seriously, right? We have to be willing to actually be as firm on these other categories, as we are on some of our other beliefs about what qualifies somebody to be in the pulpit or to be in leadership, part, we have to be willing to actually, to really grapple with it. I think Diane’s work is beautiful, especially when it comes to that question of power and authority, and being able to recognize some of those threshold red flags. On ritualistic abuse, a gentleman named Michael Salter does quite a bit of work. He’s one of the world’s leading experts on ritualistic abuse. He’s not a Christian, but his academic work is impeccable, and he also does quite a bit of work on just like on the neurobiology of trauma and memory retention, so he could be followed on social media. He’s got a lot of academic publications, and he spent years and years studying the reality of ritualistic abuse. And so I think a couple of a couple of those people are great places to start to be able to grapple with kind of, again, what does the neurobiology of trauma look like? How do we understand memory fragmentation? Is ritualistic or organized abuse a thing? And be able to just start grappling this those realities. We have to be able to grapple with the realities, to be able to let that into our consciousness enough to be able to potentially see it when it’s in front of us.

Ann Maree
Yeah, and some of our counselors, I mean, we chose them because of their expertise in certain areas, but then even learning more about what they know and what they hear. And I’m thinking of Diane Langberg being in her practice for as long as she has. I mean, they they’ve heard this stuff. They’ve heard these kind of things for years and years and years. This is not just born out of the ME TOO movement, correct? This isn’t, you know, a new I don’t know. I’m not going to say anything else.

Rachael
I think what you’re saying is really important, though, because that, I think that is something for people to understand in general. Is there those of us that work in this field, we do get those disclosures of very organized, very ritualistic abuse, things that you would look at and you would go, not possible, and then you hear it again from somebody who’s totally different, and then connected, and then again, and then again, and then again, and then again. If you sit down and you talk to trauma therapists and psychiatrists and advocates in this field, oftentimes even attorneys, we would all tell you, we get way too many disclosures of ritualistic abuse, even just on a pure statistical threshold for it to all be either that person’s making it up or they’re just not remembering correctly. It’s statistically impossible to get that many disclosures for this type of thing, and you would hear that consistently from experts like Diane in the field. And I think that’s important to grapple with.

Ann Maree
All right, so I think you’ve given us a good amount even to think about for how churches can be places that could be safe. I mean, when you talked about all of the unsafe pieces and the rotten fruit and those things, that gives us the opposite to think through for what does it safe church look like? But are there other things that a church that doesn’t want to tolerate abuse of any kind can do and make it hard for the perpetrators to hide.

Rachael
The best thing that you can do is educate and communicate, because a community that’s educated on the red flags for abuse and when I say abuse, I do mean abuse in all forms. Right? So, what is emotional abuse? What does that look like? What is narcissism? What does that look like? What is domestic abuse? What does that look like? A church that’s educated in what authority is supposed to be for, what power is supposed to be for, what the limits are, the differences between sin and patterns of abuse. A community that’s educated is a community that can hold somebody accountable. 

So we were part of a Southern Baptist, Reformed Baptist Church in Kentucky, our second church, and our pastor was preaching one time through the qualifications of elders, and he got to, you know the passage in 2 Timothy, and he was, he was talking about the qualifications, and he paused, and he said, and you need to know, this is what abusive leadership looks like. And he took the time to preach from the pulpit about what abusive leadership looks like and where to go if we ever felt that we needed protection or help, or our leaders were not being held accountable. They were part of a voluntary network of churches that were designed to give a place to appeal and to hold each other accountable. Not a good old boys club, but a genuine brother, stop me if I am in sin, and he actually instructed the congregation from the pulpit, this is who you call. This is who you can go to if I am in need of rebuke, and obviously not limiting it, but educating the congregation. This is what abusive leadership looks like. And here are some mechanisms that we have voluntarily put in place to try to make sure that we are men under accountability. Right? It was very unique. The more educated your congregation is, the more they are able to spot the red flags when they appear and know what to do, and that creates a community that’s less easily manipulated. And so an abuser that hears you talking about domestic and sexual abuse, talking about the existence of marital rape, and here’s how we’re going to handle things in our church. Here are our policies and processes. Here the support groups that we have, a church that is proactive in communicating on issues of abuse and educating on issues of abuse, and that sees it when they come when it comes up in their scripture passages, that’s a community that’s less able to be manipulated and less desirable for a predator. How we communicate on abuse isn’t the icing on the cake, it is the cake.

Ann Maree
That’s good. Desirability, yeah, you’re not going to be that congregation that the perpetrator finds and sees as useful for their own devices. Yep, great stuff.

All right, one more little section of a topic, and that would be the questions we’re now getting, since we’re doing this series about disclosure and reporting, and we’ve already mentioned some of the difficulties, like some of it’s not crime, where do you even go? Where do you go and not sound crazy, but I’m going to ask you as the attorney, but also as you know, your own expert in your experiences, too, about those difficulties in reporting. And I would like to ask it first, from the perspective of child, you know, what are those difficulties or complexities? And then also for the for the adults that might want to report?

Rachael
Yeah, absolutely. So some of this is similar when it comes to both adults and children, but the first thing to realize is that abuse often doesn’t look like we expect it to look. And for a child that lacks sexual knowledge, that lacks a lot of life experience, oftentimes they don’t even have the framework to understand what they’ve experienced, right? And so you can say, “Well, how could you not know that was wrong?” Well, because our sense of normalcy defines our perception of reality, and our experience of reality defines our understanding of what’s normal. And you do see this with domestic abuse as well. How could she not know that what she was experiencing in her marriage wasn’t okay? Well, because it was every day for her, and, you know, and I think just as a kind of an example of this, I have a brother, and when he was really little, he would he was really clumsy. He was just run into things all the time. And it just became this running joke, like, of, oh, you hear a crash, oh, he’s in the kitchen. You hear another crowd. Oh, you must have gone downstairs. And it was just this running family joke that my little brother was really clumsy, and he was maybe four or five years old one day, and he was sitting at the table, and he was, he was drawing a family portrait, you know. And you know how kids draw family portraits, arms and legs sticking out of everything. But my mother, who is a blessedly perceptive woman, noticed that when he drew these family portraits, he put everybody’s heads on one side of their body, and so she just looks down. She’s like, well, “Why’d you do that, honey?” And he’s coloring away, and he doesn’t miss a beat. And he goes, “because that’s where heads are.” “What do you mean?” “Well, that’s where heads are.” “Look up at me, where’s my head?” And he points to one side of her body. “That’s where heads are.” “Why didn’t you ever tell me that my head is on my shoulder?” “Because that’s where heads are,” right? He did not know that what he was experiencing wasn’t normal. So he didn’t know he needed to say, “what I’m experiencing isn’t normal.” His experience of reality defined his understanding of normal and especially for a child that’s raised in that environment, being raised being told adults are to be obeyed, your pastor is anointed by God. These spiritual men are in authority over you. They’ve been taught all these things, and oftentimes, they’ve been groomed and taken care of in a way that they feel loved. And this is their community, even if it’s very unhealthy community, it’s the only community that they’ve ever known, right? And so for a child that’s in that situation, they don’t even know that what they’re experiencing isn’t normal. They don’t know that they need to say it. They certainly don’t have the framework or categories to articulate it. So they don’t disclose because they have no comprehension that what they’ve experienced isn’t normal, and by the time they reach adulthood, oftentimes it’s still the same way, it’s their entire perception of reality has been defined by what they’ve experienced in this community for their entire growing up years.

Ann Maree
So. Yes, yes. And Carya used that very term that was her normal, yeah. What are some of the ways that I mean? I don’t want to leave our audience with no hope whatsoever. But how? Let’s say we see the red flags. Let’s say we’re educated enough to notice red flags, and we see them in a church and some of the people, what can we do safely to help those people who are trapped?

Rachael
Yeah, so I do think becoming knowledgeable is really important, right? Knowing, knowing your own limit. Again, education at the outset is really important. Proactivity ideally, before we even reach that situation is important. What can on just on a pure policy level? What can we do to make sure that our churches are equipped to know what to do in those situations. Is there a policy for mandatory reporting? Is there a policy for who has to be notified if a disclosure happens? What kinds of training do our leadership and people who are kind of at the front lines, you know? And that’s more than just pastors, oftentimes, especially at least in Southern Baptist churches, your kind of front line of defense is your home group leader, you know, like your home Bible Study leader, your Sunday school teacher. Are those people who are, who are kind of being put in the role of shepherds in some level of authority, and they’re kind of being put in this care group position? Are they equipped to see the red flags? Those are questions that lay people can ask, “Hey, what are we doing to make sure that our leadership team is equipped? When was the last time we had a policy review? What is our policy for disclosures and mandatory reporting and crisis response?” And all these things? Having it in place before a crisis hits or a red flag is seen is really important, and so that’s something we can start doing right away with the hope that things are set up well, so that if red flags do start to emerge, we have the right things in place to catch them and do something about them right. And this is, this is something we can see. Christianity Today went through a big assessment process about a year and a half, two years ago now, and this is a great example. They released all of their assessment material, and all those things. But one of the things that came out of that was there was a particular individual who some staffers, many women, female staffers, were uncomfortable with. And there were things that had gone on that were kind of outside the bounds of normal. One of the things that came out of that was under previous leadership at CT, HR, processes had not been set up well. And so while there were individuals that were expressing concern, there had never been proper documentation done. And so when new leadership came in and they heard these concerns, when they opened the file, it looks like there’s never been anything said, All right, but in reality, this is the fifth, sixth time that somebody has said, “Hey, we’re not comfortable with what’s going on here.” That’s just a that’s just a very easily fixable breakdown, where there are lots of things on a basic Child Protection standpoint, how cell phones can be used and who can pick kids up, and that if we have those things in writing, we have something to fall back on so that red flags can actually be acted on, rather than not being able to act or not knowing what to do when those red flags get seen. So being proactive in setting up the processes and the communication channels and the training so that those things are in place before we see a red flag is really important, and that’s something that everybody can do with their leadership, making sure that they know where to point people for where to get good training. Some of the groups that say they do great training really don’t do great training, where can you actually get a really good policy review, having somebody on call who is a who can help with the crisis work when you see that red flag, right? Not an attorney that’s going to be liability focused, but somebody who understands this work, who’s going to be able to say, “hey, here are the things that you need to think through, and here are the steps that we need to take.” Knowing what to do when you see a red flag is critical, and that can be done before we get to the red flag.

And then the more educated the congregation is and we are as individuals for what those red flags look like and what steps to take, the more proactive we can be at being able to kind of head those things off at the past to the greatest extent possible, and then also knowing on the back end, how do we care well, for those who have suffered, how do we become safe places where people might disclose to us or they’re they know that they’re safe to disclose to us, and a lot of that really goes down to a our knowledge, but also how we communicate on these things. And most of us have social media platforms or friend groups we gather around the coffee table at church, right? We have these communities that we’re part of, and we have these platforms that we use to verbalize our ideas. How intentionally are you using those platforms to talk about sexual and domestic violence and to be able to show ‘Hey, I do understand these dynamics.’ Yeah, and the more we talk about those things, the more survivors will be able to see that and go, ‘Okay, that might be a person that I can talk to.’

Survivors are always looking to see how well do people around me understand what I’ve been through, and they see how we talk about abuse in our own political party or in our own special theological movement, they see what we say about the victims that are closest to us, and they know that’s what they would really think about me, too. So how we talk about these issues is either going to signal that we are safe and we’re willing to see the hard things even in our own community, we’re willing to do the hard things even in our own community, or that sexual abuse and domestic abuse is a really nice whipping boy when we want to beat up on the person on the other side of the fence, the other political party, or the other religious affiliation, but we’re not actually going to be willing to see it when it’s here in our own community, how we talk about it is critical. 

Ann Maree
Yeah, yeah. And just thinking about this last question as you’re talking like, where’s the justice here? Is there justice? Yeah, I think that’ll be, that’ll be how I wrap this up. If you could just maybe share some hope with the victim or the survivor that’s listening today who’s heard mostly not because of anything you’ve done wrong, but just a lot of depressing information and ways in which the church is not helping. What does justice look like for them?

Rachael
I think there are a lot of layers to that, and I think the first thing that we do have to do is sit and grief at the brokenness of our system, because the reality is that most sexual survivors, sexual assault survivors and domestic abuse survivors are not going to see justice in our court system. Out of every 300 rapes reported to the police, on average, five to nine result in criminal conviction and jail time on any given year, every super great once in a while we get as high as 25 out of 300 but you’re still a needle in a haystack, right and out of out of the chosen few that make it to criminal conviction and jail time, the average length of the jail sentence is often shorter than somebody would serve for possessing and controlled substance. I think we have to sit in the grief of how broken the system is at the outset, and then also to recognize that the truth and our value and our identity are not dependent on the societal response that we receive. Right, we know what the truth is, and we can speak the truth, and we can cling to the truth, and we can grieve the truth in ways that are not destructive, because we’re not dependent on society’s affirmation of what we’ve been through.

And then a step beyond that is that we’re not dependent on those things, because there is a standard of absolute right and wrong right. There is a God who is a God of justice, and we don’t always understand why he delays that justice until the final time and again we sit in the grief and the reality of that, but we do know that he promises it right. CS Lewis has this famous quote in his book Mere Christianity, where he says, “My argument against God was that the universe was so cruel and unjust, but where had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he first has some idea of straight.” And that can be a really beautiful thing to hold on to, because survivors have experienced so much of the crooked, but we can name the crooked, and we can identify the crooked, and we can grieve the crooked, because the straight really does exist. And the more that we can identify and see the crooked, the further proof that is that the straight really does exist, and that frees us to do a couple of things.

It frees us to grieve the brokenness and the damage, and it also frees us to know that there is still hope. Because no matter how crooked the crooked gets, the straight does exist, and the ability to identify the crooked proves the existence of the straight and all of the things that we don’t understand this side of heaven, and there are many they can’t contradict the things that we know are true. And so oftentimes, I actually start in the book of Revelation, where you see this picture of Jesus coming back wearing white robes that are dipped in blood, bearing the sword of justice, because that’s the ultimate picture of how much he cares about the evil that’s been done. And that’s an incredibly powerful picture. I always heard the cross of Christ preached as, this is how ugly your sin is. But nobody ever took the cross and held it up and said, ‘This is how much the sin done against you matters’ right? And so when we learn to see those things. Is in the nature and the character of God to see how very deeply he does care about injustice and the promises of coming back and bringing justice, it helps us to see that straight line when we’ve experienced so much of the crooked.

Ann Maree
That’s a beautiful way to end it. Thank you.

That’s all for today. Thank you for joining Rachael and I and for supporting this season’s storyteller by enhancing your education about the topics on the 2025 season.

We are greatly encouraged to hear the positive feedback from our audience and the ways in which you all are learning and growing by bearing witness. It has been our privilege and honor to bring you these stories and to introduce you to the storytellers.

Join us next time on the Safe to Hope podcast, when we will listen in to the fourth installment of Carya’s story.

Safe to Hope is a production of HelpHer. Our Executive Producer is Ann Maree Goudzwaard. Safe to Hope is written and mixed by Ann Maree and edited by Ann Maree and Helen Weigt. Music in this season is ‘Cinematic Slow Sad Piano | Soundtrack’ by OpenMusicList, licensed via Pixabay. We hope you enjoyed this episode in the Safe to Hope podcast series.