[Today’s post comes from HL Griffin, currently pursuing a graduate degree from Duke Divinity. TW: sexual abuse, church abuse]
Reporting someone you love and think you know for sexual abuse is not easy. To take allegations seriously means that your whole world is shaken and your confidence in your ability to know what is real goes away.
I admire people who do the right thing anyway.
When a community has been groomed by a predator, they are bound up in the predator’s false reality to like and identify with the predator. If a victim discloses abuse and the community’s affinity for the victim is not a strong as the abuser, they might easily believe the predator. Predators who groom communities not only weave the community in to their own false story, they usually appeal to the false images within the community. They flatter them. They magnify them.
It’s easy to trust people who help you pretend that you are who you wish you were. If your community is pretending that they are what they are not and a predator takes advantage of this Community Mythology, that community is not going to have the virtues to face themselves when a victim of sexual abuse cries out for help. They are already well-practiced in suppressing reality. The predator found those blindspots & set up his nest in them. Predators may amplify those vices, but they usually don’t create them.
Most communities have areas of shared mythology of a greatness they do not truly possess. If a victim alleges sexual abuse, the impulse to believe the abuser rather than the victim is already well-practiced in the community. It’s simply an extension of the liturgy of remembering the Community Mythology, routinely enacted together for years already. Like the predator, the members of the community have a way they need the story to turn out and are practiced at suppressing reality together to hold onto that story. They have a lot to lose by facing the facts. They probably don’t have as much to lose as the predator.
They are certainly not risking as much as the victim of abuse who reports, hoping their community will help. Still, losing who we wish we were is a lot to lose when we have to face the possibility that who we actually are is a community that enabled abuse for years. If their love for the truth and their love for the victims are greater than their love of their Family Idols made in the likeness of who they wish they were, they will report the abuse and seek to take care of the victims and reckon with what has gone wrong.
If not, they won’t. If you don’t want to find out the truth of people that you like, it’s probably because you are like them in some way. Identification and affinity are great shapers of our perception of reality.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that we are alike in being predators, of course. But it may mean that we are alike in seeking safety in a false reality. If we are part of church communities, we may put the name of Jesus on that false reality and anchor our sense of safety with God in God’s willingness to uphold that false reality. It doesn’t mean that people in these systems don’t really know God or don’t really love Jesus, but they usually don’t trust Jesus as much as they think they do. They usually need to see the healing and the sanctification as further along than it actually is.
We all do that to some extent and tend to select for people who will collude with us in the same false story without realizing it. Those people feel safe and like they get you. I suspect that most of us never realize when we are seeking enablers and bonding with them. These areas of shared false reality are areas where we, without realizing it, hide from God’s presence. The more people whom we trust that share this vision, the more impervious we are to challenges to our false reality. They can all be deflected and explained away.
One of the things that I worry about with the investigations into mishandling of abuse allegations in various dioceses of @The_ACNA is how far the shared Family Mythology is. Despite subsidiary, we had enough in common to take a shared family name. Leaders endorse other leaders because they identify with them and like them, even if they don’t live close enough to know them well. If facing failures in other leaders whom we like and with whom we identify means a shared Family Mythology is threatened, it’s easier said than done.
No one has to have malicious intent to have a vested interest in believing people with whom they like and identify over people who they do not know well enough to like or identify with. We don’t have to have malicious intent to suppress reality about someone whom we like when that means that we have to face our own weaknesses in areas in which we are like them. We don’t have to have malicious intent. We may even mean to do well. But we may not know how to do well. We don’t know what we don’t know, and we won’t come to know things that are too painful to face.
This is part of why organizations should never investigate themselves. They can never be objective. They are part of the same organization because there is some likeness and affinity. Where there is likeness and affinity, there is an incentive to not face the failures of other members of the organization because that means we will potentially have to face parts of ourselves that are like the leaders who failed. It might mean facing ways that these failures are built into a structure that we identify with and which we have sacrificed a great deal to build and maintain.
No one likes to think Paul was writing 1 Cor 3.10-15 about people whom we like and with whom we share a likeness. If we can’t face ourselves by facing what is like us but is not like God, it may be because we have likened to God that which is not God. It may be that the goodness of God is threatened in facing ourselves because we thought we were more like God than we actually are. No idol is as dangerous as an idol that we have come to call “Jesus.” We will make sacrifices in the name of defending a False Jesus that bring dishonor to the name of the True Jesus. If we have built things in the name of the False Jesus that are burnt up in the fire, the False Jesus is not going to be able to save us. The best thing that we can do is to ask the Real Jesus to save us, even if it feels like we will lose everything else.
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Heather L Griffin is a grad student at DukeDiv MTS. She can be found at Twitter @hlgriffin.
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