The Hulu series Under the Banner of Heaven has a lot of people asking “Does the Church create violent, abusive men? Does it foster the attitudes that lead to violence?” At the same time, many progressive Mormons have criticized the portrayal of supposedly mainstream Church members in the show, claiming that they are unfamiliar to us, that we don’t see ourselves and our experiences here.
A story broke this week revealing that the Southern Baptist Convention has been hiding clerical sex abuse that it said it couldn’t track (but was apparently tracking the whole time). This story is rocking that particular faith right now. Their abuse was unique because the SBC is a coalition of independently run churches, and the Convention had long dismissed victims by claiming that churches ran independently and they didn’t have the means to track abusive pastors. The scandal revealed this to be untrue; they were tracking them, and some board members were protecting the abusers through targeted intimidation of victims while allowing the pastors to just open a new church. There were roughly 700 pastors being tracked. You can hear more about it here.
We are all familiar with the Catholic priest sex abuse scandals, and the genocide against Native American children torn from their families and forced to attend religious schools in the US and Canada, suffering mistreatment, abuse and poor conditions. There have also been sex abuse scandals in the Boy Scouts of America organization, including victims from our own congregations. Each of these organizations has its own abuse narrative, the justifications abusers use, both to themselves and to others, the people in power who protect the abusers, the types of victims, the story of how the abuse unfolds and how it is then covered up or minimized. The stories may vary, but repeating themes emerge.
What does uniquely Mormon abuse look like? Lindsay Hansen Park has done some excellent work curating stories of abuse victims for whom the Hulu abuse narrative resonated. Several of these stories involve women whose partners tried to coerce them into practicing polygamy. Many stories also included men physically and verbally abusing women for not “submitting” to their priesthood authority. In the series, a father justifies incest using these same ideas. When women are reduced to gender roles, they are seen as interchangeable to some men, someone there to fill the various needs of that man: childcare, cooking, cleaning, running a household, and providing sex. A key difference in the Mormon narrative is that every man holds the priesthood. Clerical abuse isn’t confined to the Church; we’ve imported it into our living rooms and bedrooms. Obviously, the majority of men are not abusers, but those that are have a powerful narrative to intimidate their victims into silence. They can claim a power from God.
I’m not aware of any statistic that indicates that there is more abuse inside the LDS Church than outside; Krakauer’s post-9/11 thesis was that all religions lead to violence which strikes me as a reach, something that is unproven at least. I think we’d be hard pressed to find a violent streak in non-patriarchal, non-conservative Churches, for example. If so, is it religion that leads to violence or is it a patriarchal, conservative narrative? For example, there is a strong correlation between police officers and domestic violence (40% of officers are estimated). [1] In the discussion on this topic over at Wheat & Tares, a link to an article about religious-based child sex abuse was shared. From the abstract of that article (which included LDS case studies, among many others):
A number of uniquely religious characteristics facilitate this cultivation, which includes: theodicies of legitimation; power, patriarchy, obedience, protection, and reverence towards authority figures; victims’ fears about spiritual punishments; and scriptural uses to justify adult-child sex.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S135917891830315X?via%3Dihub
Families and Churches often contain unresolved, multi-generational trauma. This is another thesis of the Hulu series. Aside from the mantra that the abused often becomes the abuser, family trauma is even sometimes passed down through DNA in the form of epigenetic gene expression. Church trauma is passed down through rhetoric and dogma, and in our case particularly, fealty to the words of past and present leaders, even if we may sometimes hint that they were just “speaking as a man” or they are fallible humans who might make mistakes. We are careful not to name the mistakes, and to minimize any grave errors we might suspect. We sing “Praise to the Man” unironically, neatly excising the verses about violent vengeance (I do recall singing the violent parts growing up, though). We don’t talk about how problematic polygamy was, and we mostly avoid talking about it altogether if we can avoid it. If you want to know where the trauma lives, pay attention to what a family or organization avoids talking about and dealing with. Erasing and suppressing trauma isn’t the same as addressing and resolving it. [2]
Because we are in the business of “bringing the world His truth,” we also try very hard to avoid negative press that might turn converts off, which includes shows like this one, as well as news stories that bring abuse to light. It’s easier to consider abusers as mentally ill exceptions, impossible to predict, and difficult to rein in. In our quest to ensure the Church’s reputation, though, victims are often an afterthought, if they are heard and believed at all. Bishops are instructed to call for legal, not pastoral, advice when they encounter victims of abuse (this practice contains echos of the SBC’s approach that strictly focused on avoiding legal liability).
A much more common type of abuse within our congregations is domestic abuse of wives and children, not necessarily abuse by those in leadership roles. When every ecclesiastical leader involved in giving marital advice is a man, we foster an alignment with the male abuser’s perspective, not because bishops are abusive, but because they are not abusers (and don’t recognize it for what it is). While they can’t imagine being an abuser, they can imagine the horror of a false accusation more than they can imagine the horror of being a victim of abuse. Even abusers don’t admit to themselves that they are being abusive; they often cast themselves as the victim in their own mind. Everyone is the hero of their own story, even when they are really the villain. Asking abusers to self-identify in the temple recommend interview is no deterrent to abuse. A very common side effect of being abused is that victims can appear to lack credibility; the abuser has gaslit and manipulated them so consistently that even they question themselves. A victim who is crumbling under the pressure of their abuser often finds herself being interrogated and dismissed back into the arms of her abuser. So the cycle continues.
Every time we teach our young men that they have more authority than the young women, we set up a pre-written script for future abuses to be justified. We aren’t creating that abuse, and abuse is still the exception and not the rule, but we are providing the narrative. In other Churches, the abuse narrative is usually centered on the clergy. Our clergy reside in the home with us. By extending the priesthood to all males, we’ve also handed them a script that clergy in other faiths use to justify their abuses. By doubling down on gender roles, we’ve taught men that women are separate, a whole different species of being designed to support the home and family; any perceived failure on that front can be twisted by an abuser into a justification. A person living under the threat of violence is not going to be effective at any roles, much less the demands of motherhood and caregiving. The abuser creates additional justification through these intimidation tactics.
Obviously, the abuser bears the ultimate responsibility for their crimes. But if we want to help those who have been abused to survive their abuse, we need to understand their perspective and put victims first. As a missionary, I was approached by many women who were victims of domestic abuse. I had no training or personal experience with this, and the only tool in my kit was baptism. I suspect that as a sister, this was a more common occurence for me than the elders, although I’m sure they also were also sometimes sought out by abuse victims. One extremely distraught woman approached me because she was Catholic and had an abortion, and she was afraid she was going to hell. She had the abortion because she was sure her violent and abusive husband would kill her. My mission president told us to drop her because her abortion was a deal-breaker that in his view barred her from baptismal potential; her violent abuse was not even on his radar once he heard the word “abortion.” I didn’t know what I could personally do for her, and she haunts me still. Is she even still alive?
When we encourage women to be financially dependent on their husbands, to marry early, to have children often and early, we are creating vulnerabilities that make it nearly impossible for a woman to leave an abusive relationship and survive. Another commenter, PWS, shared a story that further illustrates the problem with anti-divorce attitudes in Church culture, even when abuse is happening. He shared the example of a BYU Alumni magazine article about “soft thoughts” about divorce, including the example of a woman whose husband was extremely controlling and abusive, with no regard for her mental or physical health.
Cora’s soft thoughts about divorce began early on, when Hugh decided unilaterally there would be no birth control and Cora subsequently bore four children in five years.
“I loved being a mother,” she says, “but I was overwhelmed and resentful because I felt I didn’t have a voice in my marriage.”
https://magazine.byu.edu/article/divide-or-conquer/
That saving this marriage without clearly identifying the abuse would be lauded in the Church-owned school’s publication is concerning, whatever the intentions. If one spouse makes decisions “unilaterally” that harm the other spouse and cause her to feel she “doesn’t have a voice,” folks, that’s abusive. If we are so incapable of recognizing the abuses in our midst when they are this obvious, how much harder must it be when the abusers are clever enough to hide what they are doing? Apparently there are enough members in our midst who see this story as normal, that nobody batted an eye. I wish I could say that this article was from the 1970s, but it was published in winter of 2018. Is there really anyone who would want their daughter or friend to remain in such a marriage, where her feelings and well-being are completely disregarded?
While I as a lifelong Church member have never personally been abused, I know many women in the Church who have been. I know many victims of incest, and I also know many whose husbands verbally or physically abused them, intimidating them into silence, turning Church members and leaders against them by claiming they were crazy or untrustworthy. When terrible things happen, it’s like stacking slices of Swiss cheese on top of each other. Each layer is a support network or systemic element that should be there to stop or prevent abuse, but sometimes the holes all line up, and unfortunately, the more holes, the more likely the abuse gets through and continues. Family members, Church leaders, and Church doctrines often provide more support and privilege to the abuser than the abused, whether intentionally (he’s a priesthood holder! a provider!) or unwittingly (he’s such a good guy!). When a victim is imperfect, often a byproduct of abuse, we tell her to do better, to forgive, to be better, to be humble (which is a huge pile-on since abusers are already adept at filling their victims with shame). We poke more holes in her Swiss cheese rather than seeking to help her. We reinforce her abuser’s justifications that place the blame on her and encourage her to downplay her abuse, even to herself.
I have some mixed feelings about the Hulu series, and a lot of it was foreign to my own experience (as someone not from Utah), but it is raising some questions about abuse that need to see the light of day. We have some work to do. We need to become more victim-centric, providing better advice, support and listening to women, which is nearly impossible in a Church run entirely by men that encourages (in word [3] if not deed) families to also be run by men. We need to teach leaders and members how to recognize abuse for what it is, rather than consulting lawyers to protect our reputation. Leaders need to be taught skepticism about the abuser’s version of events at bare minimum, something that is pretty rare in the stories I’ve heard. We need to quit believing that the preservation of an abusive marriage (or one in which children are being sexually abused!) is preferable to divorce; there are so many things worse than divorce, and we seem to be unwilling to acknowledge that.
And lastly, we need to quit handing abusers a pre-written script that justifies their actions. That last one is particularly tricky with our Church’s history of polygamy and patriarchy. While our contemporary versions of both of these things is less extreme than our fundamentalist cousins’, it’s still a ready-made script for abusers, particularly when combined with mandated gender roles, encouraged female financial dependence, and every man having the priesthood. These things don’t create abusers, but they do give them ammunition to use in their abuse, and more importantly, a way to justify it to themselves.
I have grave doubts that we will do any of these things, unfortunately. The more women I know, the more these very similar stories I hear continue to erode my hope. We don’t listen to women. We don’t train leaders well enough at all. We care more about modesty than rape. We blame victims. We fear breaking up bad marriages. We imagine abusers to be protectors and providers because that’s what they claim to be, and we need men to run our congregations more than we need women.
Discuss.
[1] Unfortunately, Google now thinks I’m being abused.
[2] Hello, CRT!
[3] That word being “preside”