Teach and model mutuality between men and
women and challenge the ongoing legacy of
patriarchy in the church.

– From “What we will do…As church institutions,” in “Churchwide Statement on Sexual Abuse.” Passed by Mennonite Church USA Delegate Assembly, Kansas City, July 2015.

Institutions are crowded. In noticing the crowds, we also notice the orientation devices that direct the flow of human traffic in particular ways. We all know the experience of ‘going the wrong way’ in a crowd…You have to become insistent to go against the flow, and you are judged to be going against the flow because you are insistent. A life paradox: you have to become what you are judged as being.

– Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life

***

On the day that Mennonite Church USA’s resolution on Sexual Abuse passed the assembled delegate body in Kansas City, I was skeptical that it would accomplish anything. For one thing, the language lacked specificity. There weren’t enough concrete prevention measures. There was lamenting and repenting, which felt insulting to survivors in a document that contained so little real accountability for them.

There was a lot of “What we will do.” There was almost no “How we will do it.”

The process of passing the resolution was rushed. The moderator, Elizabeth Soto Albrecht, aggressively discouraged amendments. Tyler Tully, a physical abuse survivor and delegate, told me the following in an interview about his own attempt to amend the resolution from the floor:

There were people, myself included, who were very frustrated that there were no concrete steps for accountability in the resolution. For example, how do we implement this statement? How do we fund background checks? How do we fund training for church leaders? Would the passage of this resolution actually protect one woman of color, one child, one disabled person, from being violated sexually? But they were not interested in passing that kind of resolution. They were interested in just passing a resolution. That was enough. That was good enough for them.

Another survivor delegate I interviewed afterwards described the denominational leadership as “needing to control rather than engage.” “There’s nothing the church needed more in that moment than non-anxious leadership,” she said. She spoke of the attempted amendment:

I wanted so badly for the church to say: we tried to do this, and we think we did a pretty good job, but we’re hearing from a survivor that we’ve fallen short. We don’t have the time to fix it, but this is so important, we’re going to try to figure it out. If only somebody had been centered enough, and non-anxious enough, to just say that. The possible healing that could have happened in the room, for me, for tons of silent, unnamed people. That could have been huge. To have the church say, we value survivors so much that we’re willing to try to figure this impossible task out. But that’s not what happened.  

A few hours after the resolution passed, I sat on the floor in the hallway of the convention center in front of the Pink Menno room with a few friends. I saw a longtime church leader with whom I was friendly walking towards us. Because I knew she had been devastated by the displays of anti-LGBTQ hatred in the delegate hall, I got up to ask her how she was. She was feeling a little better today, she said, and mentioned how happy she was that the sexual abuse resolution had passed.

“I’m worried it’s not specific enough to make any difference,” I said.

But she wasn’t worried, it seemed. She assured me that the actual language of the resolution wasn’t the important part. All the specifics could be ironed out later, added on. The main hurdle was proposing and passing the resolution in the first place, and the church had now jumped that hurdle.

Because I didn’t know what else to say, and because I was tired and knew she was too, I smiled and told her that I hoped she was right. I didn’t know how to tell her that her confident trust in what came next made me feel even more defeated.

***

Nothing gets done without committees. This is a fact of modern life. When I was younger, I believed that forming committees was just something that Mennonites did, because my parents, like most of the Mennonite adults in my life, were always serving on committees. When I grew up, I discovered that everyone who organizes things has committees. It wasn’t a Mennonite thing; it was an adult thing.

If it’s true that nothing gets done without committees, it’s also frequently true that committees get nothing done. There are a host of reasons why committees fail to get things done. Sometimes they flounder because they have no clear mandate; sometimes they stall because the problem they have been set up to solve is too big for them, or because one or two members are on the committee mainly to enjoy the sounds of their own voices. Committees can fall victim to their own internal cultures, convincing themselves they have accomplished something that is incoherent to outsiders. And occasionally, a committee fails because they collectively decide that they can’t bear the damage that they would do with their success.

In the world of dismantling oppression, there are many committees. Within institutions–where hopes of transformation almost inevitably hit the murky waters of compromise–these committees go by a variety of names: “Task forces.” “Panels.” In some circles, “Discernment Groups” or even “Listening Committees.”

When the University of Kansas, my doctoral alma mater, faced charges of systemic sexual violence from feminist student activists, the university administration responded by establishing a sexual assault task force. They chose some good people to be on it, including the chair of the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. In response to the administration’s move, the chair of my own department, American Studies, Dr. Jennifer Hamer, sent out an open letter with the following statement: “As faculty members, we well know that task forces are often offered to students, faculty, and staff as short-term, immediate responses to endemic institutional issues. Task forces can ‘quiet’ an issue and give the illusion of progress, but they lack the authority to make, implement or enforce university policy.”

This is the trap that we frequently fall into when doing justice work inside of institutions: Administrators are usually the people with the power to actually change policy. But when the needed policy changes involve racism, sexism, ableism, heterosexism, and other forms of systemic social violence, most modern administrators understand that they need at least the appearance of collaborative work with people from the oppressed groups in question.

Enter the committee/task force/panel/discernment group. They’re usually made of some combination of good company players who follow the rules, idealistic young people from whatever marginalized group is at the center of the “issue” that needs addressing, and rabble-rousers who have thus far been able to maintain a decent institutional reputation. The most positive spin on this model is that this multiplicity of voices can come together to suggest meaningful policy changes that address the concerns of a broad range of stakeholders. The most cynical interpretation is that these committees are formed primarily to make institutions look good, with just enough ideological uniformity to get people into a room together and just enough ideological discord to make them self-sabotage.

Then, of course, there’s the final safety valve for the guardians of the status quo, which is that administrators do not, in fact, have to listen to the committee. The proposals of justice-oriented task forces are rarely accepted wholesale. They are more often accepted only as the opening volley in a negotiation between drastically mismatched players. While the end result is almost inevitably heralded as a victory for all concerned, there are losers in this game. More often than not, the losers are the same people who were losing when the game started.

And if the game has been truly successful, all the marginalized players trust each other a little less. Because they’ve been forced to compete with each other for the institution’s money and attention, they are more likely to view one another as adversaries. This is how women, abuse survivors, people of color, LGBTQ people, and disabled people end up fighting each other within systems where the bulk of the money and power still rests in the hands of men. Usually straight men (as far as we know). Almost always white men. They are frequently the same white men who garner praise for their devotion to the causes of the marginalized.

One of the most effective ways to thwart the dismantling of systemic oppression is to find qualified people who understand that oppression, give them a vague mandate, and then waste their time.

***

Let me be clear: the game I just described, by my analysis, is fully operational in MC USA.

MC USA’s Executive Board staff cabinet selected the Panel on Sexual Abuse Prevention in December 2015, by the mandate of the resolution passed in July. I didn’t feel much hope when the Panel was appointed. My lack of hope was not connected to the individuals on the Panel itself, several of whom are respected friends. I didn’t have hope because I didn’t trust the process that created their mandate, nor did I trust the process of their selection. In the creation and rushed passage of the Churchwide Resolution on Sexual Abuse, I saw that MC USA executives, and Executive Director Ervin Stutzman in particular, seemed more interested in a controlled message of generalized concern than they were in actually hearing from more survivors and starting to understand and address the real problem.

And the real problem is not that the Mennonite church’s image is being tarnished by its sexual abuse issues, or that John Howard Yoder’s pacifist legacy has been ruined by the fact that he was a serial sexual predator, or that EMU’s reputation is hurt by the allegations against their former VP Luke Hartman, or that Virginia Mennonite Conference’s leadership looks like a cowardly den of hypocrites. These things are not the problem.

The problem is that the abuse happened. The problem is that it is still happening. The problem is that it is everywhere. The problem is that powerful men are keeping each other’s secrets. The problem is that churches aren’t doing what needs to be done to stop it. The problem is that when you tell the truth about sexual abuse, you have to scream from the mountaintops to be heard, and then you will be told that you are shrill and adversarial and “crazy.” This is the real problem.

In queer theorist Sara Ahmed’s study of institutional diversity work, which I cite at the beginning of this piece, she writes about the ways in which attentiveness to race, gender, and sexuality have become matters of public relations in a university. Again and again, diversity workers she interviewed who worked within universities came up against the same obstruction: white administrators were diagnosing the problem differently than they were. From the perspective of these administrators, the problem was that the university was perceived as a white-dominated old boys club. Ahmed calls this “the presumption that the perception is the problem.”

Ahmed writes, “Diversity becomes about changing perceptions of whiteness rather than changing the whiteness of organizations.” The goal, then, isn’t to dismantle white supremacy within the institution, but rather to get rid of the perception that it exists.

Which brings me back to my opening quote from the Resolution on Sexual Abuse. The resolution posed “the ongoing legacy of patriarchy in the church” as a problem to be challenged. There is even a bit of a solution proposed, to “teach and model mutuality between men and women.”

So who’s doing the teaching and modeling, here? Church leaders? Is this statement intended to address the problem of patriarchy, or the problem of the perception of patriarchy?

If MC USA leadership is truly invested in teaching and modeling a challenge to patriarchy, then they’re going to have to demonstrate some respect for women that goes deeper than tokenization and window dressing. That respect can’t just be extended to the very short list of women who have managed, despite considerable obstacles, to rise in power within Mennonite institutions. It also has to extend to women like Lauren Shifflett, women whose victimization has driven them to the margins–or completely out–of their Mennonite churches and communities.

The definition of “patriarchy” is not, in fact, “the appearance of being sexist, which is increasingly unpopular and can be therefore be addressed through strategic displays of concern for violence against women.” The definition of patriarchy is the systemic dominance, maintained through violence and ideology, of some men over women, gender nonconforming people, and other, subordinated men. Social class, racism, and ableism all play various roles, depending on the historical and cultural context, but the constant factor is systemic dominance. It is the root of sexual violence. We will not solve sexual violence by treating Ervin Stutzman like a denominational Daddy and then trusting that Father knows best.

What might “mutuality” between genders actually look like, if we were to take the words off the paper and apply them to the most visible sexual abuse crisis in the Mennonite Church right now: the investigation of the abuse suffered by Shifflett by Hartman, her trusted mentor and former Sunday School teacher?

From the beginning of MC USA’s involvement with Shifflett’s case, she received the message that her abuse story was a public relations problem to be managed. Stutzman, acting inexplicably as a kind of overseer to the Panel’s decision-making, ignored Shifflett’s vocal desire to be part of the process of determining who would investigate the abuse. In fact, he ignored her completely, which would be less remarkable, perhaps, had he not so thoroughly insinuated himself into a process with a profound effect upon her life.

When Shifflett’s sister, Marissa Buck, challenged him in an email on the total silence from MC USA towards her family, and on the conflicts of interests inherent in the process he was directing, he responded with two notable things: He challenged her claims of conflicts of interest (demonstrating that Buck has an unquestionably superior understanding of the phrase), and without apologizing for the silence, he invited her and Shifflett to meet with him personally. This latter invitation may seem like a good response to the critique of his silence, but it reveals how little time Stutzman, like many other administrators, has spent actually listening to experts on sexual abuse talk about boundaries and power imbalances. From the beginning, Shifflett has made it clear that those who want to speak to her about her abuse experience should contact her through her chosen advocate, Barbra Graber. That rule applies to everyone–and especially to powerful administrators and executives.     

This behavior is a symptom of patriarchy: Men imagining themselves as sources of inherent objectivity and reason. (White men are particularly susceptible to this disease.) Men expecting trust from women, and granting none in return. I don’t know how much time it would take to teach the men in leadership positions in MC USA that they can no longer get away with demanding trust. More time than I have, certainly. More time than most women have.

***

Somehow, the young woman who chairs the Panel on Sexual Abuse Prevention, Anna Groff, ended up as the only Panel member on another panel, chaired by Stutzman, which was assembled to evaluate the recommendations of the original Panel. Silence about the process was a condition of her participation. She was reportedly forbidden, by EMU, to tell Shifflett or anyone else (including her own panel members) about the investigative firms that EMU and MC USA were considering for Shifflett’s case.

Institutions guard secrets that threaten their image, and Mennonite institutions are no different from others. (This, by the way, is not the same thing as saying that all people within institutions are monsters who don’t care.) EMU’s demand for Groff’s silence, while reprehensible, is squarely within the playbook of standard administrative behavior. Like many university administrations, EMU leaders are realizing that they’re out of compliance with federal civil rights legislation and they are doing what they think is needed to avoid lawsuits. That doesn’t mean that no one in EMU administration cares at all about survivors. It means that they’re prioritizing the problem of perception.

This all brings us back to the question that inspired my initial skepticism: for what reason does the executive board cabinet of this denomination appoint a Panel on Sexual Abuse Prevention? To solve the problem of perception? Or to solve the problem of abuse?

Within SNAP Mennonite, we worried from the beginning that it was the former, and that the people on the panel would have their time wasted. We worried that it would all happen behind closed doors, and that if and when we challenged it, we’d be labeled as paranoid extremists making up stories and trying to destroy the church (a charge that the Catholics who created SNAP know all too well). And most of all, we feared that the secrecy and the empty statements that secrecy produces would drive away survivors who might otherwise come forward with their truth. We were right to fear those things.

But as it turned out, there would be an extraordinary factor, and that is the courage and fierce intelligence of Shifflett and Buck. Their engagements with the Panel are their story to tell, not mine, so I will focus on the one aspect I found particularly striking: their refusal to extend trust that has not been earned.

Readers, do you understand how brave this is? Part of how secretive processes thrive in churches is through theology that upholds naivete and uninformed trust as  great virtues. Among Mennonites, we even manage to infuse the notion of naivete with peace theology, as if lack of trust itself is an act of violence. To withdraw one’s trust from a church process, in a Mennonite context, is to go against a powerful flow.

But for victims of sexual violence and stalking, lack of trust is a survival skill, and when survivors are able to extend their trust again, the person, process, or institution that betrays that trust becomes an agent of retraumatization. If you want to see what that looks like, read Buck’s account of the response of leadership at Lindale Mennonite Church to Shifflett’s experience.

Shifflett and Buck gave the Panel an extraordinary gift: a lack of trust. A demand that trust be earned, not for the sake of perception, but for the sake of the real problem at hand. They gave the Panel the courage to walk away from a retraumatizing process and say, from their position of power, we stand with survivors, against the flow.

It will take much, much more of this courage to correct the perception of the problem. It will require even more to take on the problem itself.