by Suzanne

I was sexually assaulted by my father, paternal uncles and paternal grandfather as a child. My mother was aware of the abuse by my father and participated on one occasion. It started when I was a toddler, before the core of who I was had fully coalesced. I grew up in pieces, segmented and regimented into the Girl Who Goes to School and the One at Night and such. The level of dissociation I experienced was total and sustained.

I spent my formative years attending a Lancaster Mennonite Conference church (now known as LMC: A Fellowship of Anabaptist Churches). All I knew consciously, based on the church’s teachings, was that I was bad and that there was something broken at my core. Nothing I did, including choosing to be baptized, took away the shame which had been transmuted to me through the sadistic acts to which I’d been subjected. My relationship with my body was that of hatred and derision. The self-abuse and starvation in which I engaged were insufficient in ridding me of the soiling.

The way I treated myself, coupled with my social awkwardness and the unattractive quality of “smarts” I possessed, alienated me from my peers. I did not start dating until well in my 20’s. My fledgling sexual expression broke the dam of internal segmentation I’d, up to this point, been able to maintain. I cut off contact with my family, and, within days, the memories of what I’d experienced began to overwhelm me.

The members of my church did not know what I’d gone through as a child, but they had ample evidence that something was going awry with me as a young adult. For instance, I was regarded as “troubled” because of my ongoing battle with suicidality. After sharing with a church leader about my grandfather’s abuse, I was encouraged not to cut off family contact and to focus on reconciliation. Despite this advice, I became estranged from my family. For mostly unrelated reasons (I was already living out of state), I moved to a new apartment. Church members conspired with my parents to help them find me after I moved. This resulted in me being physically stalked and having to call the police for assistance.

In the years since this transpired, I’ve reached out to both my family to confront them and to the leadership of the Lancaster Mennonite Conference for accountability. The response from my family members was total denial. The conference representative was kind but seemed much more concerned with my supposed brokenness than with my righteous anger. A curious feature of both my parents and the response from LMC leadership was to attempt to breach my boundaries by eliciting personal details. It makes no sense to me to say, respectively, “I never did anything to you, so tell me exactly what I did to you” and “I respect your need for anonymity, so I hope we can talk on phone or in person.”

I personally believe the experience of sexual abuse within a religious community such as the one in which I was raised cannot be divorced from the larger realities of sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia and so on that penetrate said community. My father, as I knew him, was extremely racist and misogynistic. His prejudices were evident from an early age. He was raised Old Order Mennonite and described a “prank” in which he and his friends rode around in a buggy in blackface. In addition, when his first younger sister was born, he played the role of the preacher in a mock funeral in which he and his brothers buried a doll which represented the corruption that had now entered their lives. Behaviors such as these do not exist in a vacuum and are, to me, a manifestation of a belief that some of us are sub- or less-than humans whose dignity is secondary or non-existent in relation to our objectification. He didn’t just use me sexually. The gloating and scorn his eyes held during his abuse of me was a magnification of his hatred of women.

The teachings of my church were subtler but equally potent in championing a hierarchical power structure. Male headship was celebrated as the only legitimate family arrangement. We were to love the gay person but hate the sin of the gay “lifestyle.” Jesus was the savior of all races and peoples, but damn if he didn’t smile at and bless with abundance the hard-working, upstanding white Mennonite settlers in America.

Up to this point, I’ve lacked the courage to openly confront my culture of origin. I am no longer a Christian. I am a part of the LGBTQIA+ community. I identify, on and off, as a witch. I’ve become all the horrors I was warned I would become if I left the church in which I was raised. And, at the same time, I am a person who is fully committed to seeing the humanity in every single human being and to standing in solidarity with individuals and groups who are oppressed. I am less in pieces than I ever would have been had I swallowed the lie that I was the one rotten at my core who needed saving. The inner coherence I’ve achieved only in my separation from my family and the Mennonite church convinces me that, until systemic issues are addressed and rectified, the church will continue to harm and retraumatize the ones it supposedly wants to help.