“Remember, the guy sitting across the table from you wants to eat your young!”.

This was the blunt advice provided to me by a successful glass supplier who conducted business across South East Asia when I asked him for his number one tip when it came to negotiating.

I was starting out in business, and I loved picking the brains of seasoned business owners and entrepreneurs. I was particularly keen to grow my capacity to negotiate. My experience in business has shown that he wasn’t far off. When dealing with landlords, franchisors, suppliers and others in the business sector I have found that a lack of ethics and values is de-rigueur. One particular character who was trying to exploit me reassured me: “Look mate it’s not personal, it’s just business”.

My assumptive world around business is that default setting is devoid of ethics and values. My assumptive world inside the church is different. I have high expectations of fellow believers, especially Christian leaders. I expect that Christian leaders (church, denominational, parachurch) exemplify the highest standards of ethics, values and accountability. Put simply, I expect that Christian leaders and Christians behave consistent with their beliefs. My experience all too often is that my assumptions undo me.

Whilst I don’t enjoy dealing with people in business who have no values, although it makes me angry, it doesn’t particularly wound me. That is due to my assumptions surrounding their potential behaviour. I have low expectations of ethics and values in business. When it happens inside the church or a denomination it’s an entirely different story. My high expectations are shattered.

When Christians Misbehave

My formative years as a Christian were spent in a small Pentecostal church in South Africa. There were two men in the church who were regarded as prophets, or in the modern parlance bandied around by many in the Pentecostal world, they were men “who walked in the prophetic.” A Sunday morning service was never done until I heard a booming voice from the rear of the church congregation speaking out the latest prophetic word. Sometimes we would get a double hit, and both would deliver powerful sounding prophecies.

One of them had a side hussle as a travelling evangelist, doing the rounds of rural areas with a large tent, conducting revivalist gatherings amongst the local Xhosa population. It turns out that you can ‘walk in the prophetic’ and chew gum at the same time. One had an affair with a young girl the same age as his high school daughter and the other ran off with a young girl and was the subject of a police manhunt.

This was my earliest experience of Christian leadership behaving in a fashion that contradicted all my assumptions and expectations. Following from that was the discovery that a Scripture Union leader that I respected was a serial sexual abuser. Since then, I’ve had enough revelations to write a book that could nudge War & Peace on length. Having worked for the national denomination for over a decade I’ve gained an insight often to things I wish I never knew about people in the highest office of leadership. Sometimes it’s just poor character, sometimes its bullying and sometimes it’s far worse. The ‘far worse’ category has featured heavily in the news both here in Australia and abroad.

Abuse and the Church

Sexual abuse, and more particularly child sexual abuse has become synonymous with the church. Just let that sink in – synonymous with the church.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse reports that:

More than 4,000 survivors told us in private sessions that they were sexually abused as children in religious institutions. The abuse occurred in religious schools, orphanages and missions, churches, presbyteries and rectories, confessionals, and various other settings.

It goes on to report on the complicity of Christian leaders in covering up this abuse:

Religious leaders and institutions across Australia have acknowledged that children suffered sexual abuse while in their care. Many have also accepted that their responses to this abuse were inadequate. These failures are not confined to religious institutions. However, the failures of religious institutions are particularly troubling because these institutions have played, and continue to play, an integral and unique role in the lives of many children. They have also been key providers of education, health and social welfare services to children in Australia for many years. They have been among the most respected institutions in our society. The perpetrators of child sexual abuse in religious institutions were, in many cases, people that children and parents trusted the most and suspected the least.

Many people who experience child sexual abuse have the course of their lives altered forever. Many of the survivors we heard from continue to experience the ongoing impacts. For some, these impacts have been profound. They include a devastating loss of religious faith and loss of trust in the religious organisation that was once a fundamental part of their life. The impacts have rippled out to affect their parents, siblings, partners, children and, in some cases, entire communities. Some victims have not survived the abuse, having since taken their own lives.

The Commission found that:

Leaders of religious institutions have a significant role to play in creating and maintaining child safe cultures. It is evident that leaders of the religious institutions we examined were not adequately prepared for what was required of them in preventing and responding to child sexual abuse. Religious leaders should be provided with leadership training, including in relation to the promotion of child safety. They should also ensure that there are mechanisms through which they receive advice from individuals with relevant professional expertise on all matters relating to child sexual abuse and child safety (Recommendations 16.36 and 16.37).

Moral Injury

Victims of sexual abuse (or any kind of abuse) by Christian leaders experience a range of traumas. An area of growing research and understanding involves the nature of moral injury. Moral injury was a concept first developed from the study of military veterans but is now being applied across a range of different contexts.

A classic understanding of moral injury is described by the US Department of Veterans as follows:

In traumatic or unusually stressful circumstances, people may perpetrate, fail to prevent, or witness events that contradict deeply held moral beliefs and expectations (1). When someone does something that goes against their beliefs this is often referred to as an act of commission and when they fail to do something in line with their beliefs that is often referred to as an act of omission. Individuals may also experience betrayal from leadership, others in positions of power or peers that can result in adverse outcomes (2). Moral injury is the distressing psychological, behavioural, social, and sometimes spiritual aftermath of exposure to such events (3). A moral injury can occur in response to acting or witnessing behaviours that go against an individual’s values and moral beliefs.

In order for moral injury to occur, the individual must feel like a transgression occurred and that they or someone else crossed a line with respect to their moral beliefs. Guilt, shame, disgust and anger are some of the hallmark reactions of moral injury (e.g., 4). Guilt involves feeling distress and remorse regarding the morally injurious event (e.g., “I did something bad.”). Shame is when the belief about the event generalizes to the whole self (e.g., “I am bad because of what I did.”) (5). Disgust may occur as a response to memories of an act of perpetration, and anger may occur in response to a loss or feeling betrayed (6). Another hallmark reaction to moral injury is an inability to self-forgive, and consequently engaging in self-sabotaging behaviours (e.g., feeling like you don’t deserve to succeed at work or relationships).

Moral injury also typically has an impact on an individual’s spirituality (7). For example, an individual with moral injury may have difficulty understanding how one’s beliefs and relationship with a Higher Power can be true given the horrific event the person experienced, leading to uncertainty about previously held spiritual beliefs.

A more succinct description is summarised by Open Arms (counselling and care service of Department of Veterans Affairs) as follows:

Moral injury refers to the psychological, social and spiritual impact of events involving betrayal or transgression of one’s own deeply held moral beliefs and values occurring in high stakes situations. Moral injury is not a recognized mental health disorder in itself, but may be associated with PTSD or depression.

Moral Injury and the Church

Since clergy serve as representatives for God or God’s church, when clergy are perpetrators of spiritual and sexual abuse, some survivors feel like God is complicit in or responsible for their experience of violation

Marcus Mescher

Marcus Mescher (Mescher, 2023) notes that:

The category of moral injury can be applied to clergy sexual abuse and its cover-up as a moral catastrophe caused by the abuse of sacred trust placed in clergy and the church hierarchy. Moral injury helps us understand the various dimensions of psychological trauma, emotional and embodied pain, religious and moral confusion, diminished identity and efficacy, and shattered relationships.

It has been argued that whilst moral injury involves damage to the psychological sphere it can also be seen as an injury to the soul, affected by “loss, shame, guilt or regret”.(Dokoupil, 2012)

Mescher (Mescher, 2023) outlines what the effect of moral injury is on the faith dimension of victims:

For people of faith, identity is often understood in relationship with God and the church, raising disorienting theological and ecclesial questions like: Where is God and how could God allow this to happen? Does God still love me and the others who have been affected? Why didn’t the church protect me or come to my defence? Why do so many church members seem unfazed by the scale of abuse by some of its members against other members? Self-image is diminished by a sense of alienation from or abandonment by God.

Since clergy serve as representatives for God or God’s church, when clergy are perpetrators of spiritual and sexual abuse, some survivors feel like God is complicit in or responsible for their experience of violation. Insofar as priests are viewed by others as holy, respected leaders, as well as religious and moral authorities, survivors can internalize disrespect for themselves, a kind of self-suppression that can become a self-sabotage. This spiritual wound—for some, a spiritually mortal wound—leads to experiencing life in terms of loss: for some, life has been taken from them, while for others, their soul has been shattered and they feel like they have been left with nothing. Survivors describe their abuse as like the rape or murder of their soul. When they try to speak the truth of their experience and their abuse is minimized or rejected, it only compounds feelings of shame or rage, isolation or abandonment.

Heads in the sand

Christian leaders cannot bury their heads in the sand when it comes to appreciating and responding to the moral injury caused to vulnerable people. It’s distressing to have to acknowledge that a place that is meant to be safe, for many is a place of trauma and one that has caused moral injury and all the suffering that flows just from that alone.

In Part 2 we’ll look at other ways in which our unique ecclesiastical polity and the resulting amateur nature of our structures leads to other sources of moral injury in pastors (and their families), lay leaders and church members.

References

https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/religious-institutions

https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/treat/cooccurring/moral_injury.asp

https://www.openarms.gov.au/signs-symptoms/moral-injury

Dokoupil, T. (2012). A new theory of PTSD and veterans: moral injury. The Daily Beast.

Mescher, M. (2023). Clergy Sexual Abuse as Moral Injury: Confronting a Wounded and Wounding Church. Journal of Moral Theology, 3(CTEWC Book Series 3), 122-139.