← Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Survivors & Abuse Continued: Rachel Denhollander on Faith and Accountability
00:59:50
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This is Russell Moore inviting you to join me on the Russell Moore show, where we look for signposts in a strange land, standing fast to what really matters. Every week I talk with thinkers, artists and leaders about faith, culture and living a life of integrity. Kingdom over culture, wars, truth over tribalism, pilgrimage over partisanship, witness over winning, and Christ over everything. Join us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, we hope you are enjoying the show. Just so you know, the best way to contribute to the production of this podcast is actually by subscribing to Christianity Today using our special link. Orderct.com deepbluec Listeners like you get 25% off your subscription and unlimited access to the platform that elevates the stories and ideas of the Kingdom of God. That's orderct.com deep blue sea all one word. We look forward to having you join us.
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This is CT Media. A note to listeners this story contains sensitive content including sexual abuse, child murder, and dark spiritual themes, and may not be suitable for all listeners.
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A
Foreign welcome to bonus episode number five of Devil in the Deep Blue Sea. I'm Mike Kosper, and today I'm in conversation with my friend Rachel Denhollander. Rachel is an attorney, an author, and an advocate. You might also recognize her as the first woman to publicly accuse Larry Nassar in the USA Gymnastics scandal of sexual abuse, a decision that she made that helped to expose decades of systemic failure and change the way many institutions are responding to survivors. Today, Rachel and I talk about what it really costs to seek justice, the risks of telling hard truths, and how our faith communities can either protect the vulnerable or fail them completely. We here at CT are grateful for Rachel's time, her expertise, and her perspective on this topic, including the pushback that she has on some elements of the show. Enjoy the conversation. Rachel Denhollander, welcome to Devil in the Deep Blue Sea.
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B
Thanks for having me.
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A
So one of the things that I want to make sure that we don't lose in this conversation is a serious concern for victims. I have to say, like, on a personal level, the most heartbreaking piece of tape that I think that we produced for this entire series was actually a piece of archival tape that got dug up where you heard from one of the children that was alleging abuse at the McMartin Preschool. And I mean, that case has been very, very studied. It's been very deeply unpacked. There's lots of evidence that the psychologist who kind of did those forensic interviews really kind of mishandled them in ways that were just deeply Detrimental to the children. Right. And so, as one survivor of abuse put it to me, when they talked to me about this story, they said, forget the big picture for a moment and remember that for the child who had those sort of traumatic memories implanted through this coercive process, that abuse was real. And the fear you hear in that child's voice is very, very real. When they made that comment to me, like, I just felt. I felt something gutting about all of this. It's really important before we wrap up this story and wrap up this series, to come back to the kids and come back to victims and to recognize that there is a broader phenomenon here that we're trying to address as well, which is why I was so eager to kind of have you here and have you join us on the show. A place to start, maybe, would be to start with this very, very basic level for our listeners. Like, how should they think about what it takes for a survivor of abuse to come forward and level an accusation? What are the obstacles to that?
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B
As a victim advocate and as an attorney, my primary concern is justice and truth. Because the reality is, when we have something like the daycare cases that we had, what that ultimately does is incredible devastation to the real victims, to individuals who really have been sexually abused, to children who have been sexually abused. And so having the right processes in place, understanding the kinds of things that lead to what we saw in those daycare cases, understanding the reality of sexual abuse, even the reality of ritualistic abuse, we have to be able to grapple with all of those things in a way that lets us accurately diagnose the problem and also look at what kind of processes do we need to set up so that we are pursuing justice for everybody, so that we are protecting all parties involved, and so that we aren't creating a situation where we're making it even more difficult for victims of sexual abuse to come forward. On a practical level, a sexual assault victim faces just incredible obstacles, the first one being just the statistics of it. The best studies that we have show that between 92 to 98% of allegations of sexual assault are real. They also show that the average age of disclosure for childhood sexual assault is actually well into adulthood, between 45 and 54, depending on the studies that you look at. And out of every case of rape reported to the police, only five to nine out of 300 on a given year are going to result in criminal conviction and jail time. Sometimes we get outliers of up to 25 out of 300. But the reality is that the Vast majority of cases of rape result reported to the police are going to go absolutely nowhere. In my work, I have encountered victims who actually videotaped their own rapes, had the presence of mind to turn on a cell phone or their perpetrator, videotaped their rapes, and we can't get them. We can't get the police to do anything about it. I have cases with multiple victims who literally bear the physical scars on their body, and we can't get anybody to do anything with it. I have multiple cases where the perpetrator has confessed to statutory rape, raping a child under the age of 16. We have the confession. He's bragging to everybod at his workplace and at his high school. He's got prior stalking charges, and we can't get the police to do anything about it. And so I see abuse of authority on both sides of the spectrum. And I work with law firms that deal with abuse of authority on both sides of the spectrum. And so to understand the realities that survivors face, just the legal hurdles, but then also the very practical societal hurdles, the immediate accusation that the victim must be in it for money, they must want attention. When the reality is what. What disclosing sexual assault does is it invites an audience to the worst sexual experience of your life. It invites an audience to a point in time where you were intensely vulnerable and you had no agency and you had no choice. And it puts those realities and those details out there for the rest of the world to see. And one of the phenomenons that female sexual assault victims in particular experience is that it's not uncommon for other perpetrators or other individuals who are into pornography to use those descriptions of sexual assault as their own personal porn stash to actually attend trials of child sexual assault victims. We had this happen in my trial where a pedophile came just so that he could sit and listen to the testimony of these young victims. It requires relinquishing absolutely every shred of privacy and dignity and inviting the judgment of your community, the loss of relationship, and the immediate just categorization of everything that you are into that box as victim. And so we want to be really careful when we have these types of discussions that we don't make it harder for those who have been victimized, and that we do set up processes and accurate diagnostics so that we also aren't creating or egging on a culture of not believing survivors.
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A
Chris Lane, who was on the show a couple of weeks ago, he's a prosecutor from Southern Indiana. He has prosecuted a number of sexual Assault cases over the years. And one of the things that he talked about a lot was that one of the most important things to train investigators and prosecutors in is this ability to assess the evidence and to allow the evidence to then sort of dictate where the investigation goes. The temptation. And I think this was, you know, he. He pointed this out in. In part because this was so obviously the case in the satanic panic of the 1980s. The temptation for investigators is always to kind of have a narrative in the back of your head. You know, this is how this thing must have gone, or this is the phenomenon that this is a part of, or whatever the case might be, and to then go in search of evidence that fits the narrative. Otherwise. I do think, as we've produced this series, as we've talked to victims, as we've talked to survivors, as we've heard from people over this, I feel like the thing that I want to make sure that our listeners understand is that our goal is not to undermine the credibility of survivors of abuse at all. Our goal really is to examine the way that those false narratives often distract us from much darker realities that are right under our noses. And I mean, you know this better than I do, frankly, from your work, that throughout the 1980s, you know, while the church was literally panicking about sexual abuse in the graveyard next door, it was happening in the Sunday school classrooms. How would you differentiate between, like, an healthy anxiety about the presence of abusers, the presence of predators, that sort of thing, the stuff that can get pretty tinfoil hat pretty fast, you know, qanon, all that kind of stuff, and on the other side of it, a healthy awareness of the fact that there might well be a child predator next door. How do you talk to parents that are trying to navigate a situation like that?
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B
I think that's always just part of the struggle, because when you look at the statistics for childhood sexual abuse, 25% of girls will be sexually abused by the time they reach age 18. If you just sit with that reality for a moment, that's incredibly sobering. One in four of our daughters will be sexually abused before they reach age 18. A little bit more than one in four will experience sexual abuse in college, and at least one in six boys will experience sexual abuse before they reach age 18. That's an astronomically high number. And when we factor in just the rates of porn usage, particularly child sexually abusive material, and just how very much that has been on the rise, if you look at the number one porn searches for places like Pornhub, they're almost exclusively extremely deviant searches. They're child based, they're incest based, they're almost all violent. When you take a moment and you sit with that reality, part of what we have to grapple with is childhood sexual abuse is nowhere near as rare as we want it to be. No, it's not a phenomenon. It's not fringe. It's happening all the time. Adults are viewing child sexually abusive material for their own sexual pleasure on a very regular basis. That's the reality. And we do have to live in that reality. But we also have to live in a couple of different other aspects as well. One of which is that over 80% of children who are sexually abused know their abuser. It happens in the family, it happens with close friends, it happens with medical professionals and dentists and daycare workers and pastors and Sunday school teachers. These tend to be the people that you're in contact with. They're the pillars of your community. And it's happening at very high numbers. And then we do also have to grapple with how much trafficking is taking place. And I think sometimes we use the word trafficking and we use it in ways that are unhelpful because technically trafficking is when there is an exchange of somebody's sexual services for money. But most of the time when people use trafficking, they just mean a level of organization. And it really might not be technical trafficking, but oftentimes this again is happening in familial or very close family contexts. It's the babysitter or the uncle or the dad who's producing child porn in his basement and uploading the images. And it's organized and it's systematic and it's happening routinely. But it's not necessarily pimping. But we're using the term trafficking. And so using the terms correctly, I think is something that we need to do a little bit better so that we're just properly categorizing what we're seeing.
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A
And when you say organized, there's a vision of organization that looks like sort of a coordinated cabal where everybody's sort of on this text chain and they're I'm going to get this kid here and I'm going to get that kid, right? Like, there's kind of a vision of that that looks very structural. But when you say organized, it seems like what you're describing is organized in the sense that there's a chat room, right? There's a distribution network that's established and independent and predators find their ways into those kinds of distribution networks. And they're distributing this material among one another. Is there necessarily money changing hands on these kinds of exchanges?
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Not always. In fact, oftentimes they're not, because sexual abuse, especially child sexual abuse, is. It gets off on the power. It gets off on the fact that it is taboo, that it's not supposed to be happening, that it's outside the norm, that it's conquering. And so oftentimes it's not necessarily money changing hands so much as that it's just a group of a lot of deviant people together. And then we do have organized trafficking rings as well, where there is money changing hands and it is taking place in a more structured format. We do know that happens. There are real pimps, there is human trafficking. We have all of these different circles. And I think one of the things that's important to remember is that crime in the sexual abuse realm, by and large works like crime everywhere else does. If you think of drug trafficking, it's not that we have one person at the top of this international drug trafficking cabal who is pulling the strings everywhere in the world. It's that we have circles, drug traffickers, and there's a level of intersection and there's a level of communication. Some of them overlap, some of them don't. But it's not this big qanon. There's one person at the top of everything that's happening in the world, but there is a level of organization. And especially when you are a child and you're in the middle of one of those circles of Venn diagrams and you might be starting to see some of the places where they overlap, it of course, is going to feel like it's 100% top down. There's one person at the top. And so understanding what the victim is experiencing in those organized trafficking networks and understanding the reality of what that looks like, and also understanding the reality that even in that level of organization, it is most often family members or close friends who are trafficking the child through that network or making the CSAM that they're uploading. We have to sit with the reality of what we actually have in front of us and what we do know about these types of abuses. And that's a very difficult thing to do. But if we don't sit with that reality, it's going to be very difficult for us to be able to offer the help and support when it's needed.
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A
Talk to me a bit about the difficulty of memory in this whole story. I think this is a fascinating element of all of this. You know, one of the things that we covered in the series was the difficulty that is introduced when somebody who comes in and they're, they're attempting to do forensic work. But that forensic work can often be, particularly with the techniques that were being used in the mid late 1980s. These, like forensic investigators could do things that were often fairly manipulative. They could sort of incept ideas into kids minds through these, these interview techniques, these, these forensic techniques. At the same time, I mean, one of the things that we also know is that people who experience significant trauma have memory challenges. The soul tends to disassociate in experiences of trauma and sort of disconnect things. We know that there are things that sort of come back to us later. I'm curious, with your experience, particularly like your experience in victim advocacy, how has navigating the difficulty of memory been a part of your work? And how do you think about navigating this stuff when you're talking to people who are unpacking things that if they're remembering this at 45 and it happened when they were 10, you know, that's 35 years later. How do you think about all of that?
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B
One of the things we have to do is we have to anchor what we know about memory in the science that we do know. Understanding the neurobiology of trauma, the reality that our brains and our bodies are always forming connections to the sensory input around us. And it does that for positive memories and for negative memories and understanding that and just the reality that those memories can be triggered. Sometimes the body remembers what the brain does not consciously remember. I had one survivor that I worked with. I worked with a set of sisters once. And one sister disclosed to me some very specific trafficking that was taking place out of the back of a van. And there was a lot of corroboration to her story. There were people that had seen her taken away and come back. She had been working with a very good trauma therapist, had very good clear memories, filed police reports. The other sister remembered being driven away in the van, did not know that her sister had discussed with me, remembered being driven away in the van. And whenever she would talk about the white van, she would close in on herself and she would get lost in these flashbacks. But she could not remember anything attached to the van. Now I had witnesses that saw her being driven away in the van and saw her brought back in a catatonic state. But she could not remember anything in the van. And she did not know that her sister had disclosed to me being trafficked out of that van. But every Time she talked about the white van, she would shut down her body remembered what her brain could not consciously remember anymore. And we do have very good science for the reality of memory fragmentation in trauma. If you see the brain scan of a trauma victim who is recalling a flashback, it looks like the brain scan of a stroke victim. Entire regions of the brain that should be online have completely shut down, specifically the regions that process verbal input, being able to understand what somebody is saying to us, and the region of the brain that processes verbal output, being able to communicate clearly what we're remembering. And so this helps us understand why oftentimes victim stories don't come out in a completely linear fashion, because the region of the brain as they're recalling those traumatic memories that should be online, that processes their verbal output, isn't functioning. And one of the other phenomenons that we do see on MRIs of victims that are recalling trauma is that the frontal region of their brain that processes current sensory input is lighting up brightly. And that should not light up when we're recalling a memory, because that's the region of the brain that tells us this is happening to you right now. And so when that region of the brain is lighting up in memory recall, it means that the victim isn't recalling the memory as a past memory, maybe a very bright memory, but a past memory. They're recalling it in a form full body immersive. This is happening to me in this moment. And part of the risk that we do see is that when you have investigators or you have therapists that are using very poor techniques when they are suggesting things, when the victim is in that flashback in that state, it can start being processed as this thing that I'm being told is happening to me right now, and it gets connected to the original trauma. And you do see that happen in the daycare cases. A fairly large number of the children in those daycare cases were sexually abused. But what happened when they disclosed or when investigators started digging into it, is they used very manipulative techniques. They used very sloppy techniques. And so the suggestions of the memories got looped in together with the real abuse that those children had suffered. And that does incredible damage. And those of us who work in the victim advocacy space know better than anyone the damage that that does, because one thing it does is it causes sexual assault victims to carry even more trauma than they already have, which is a horrible thing to do to a victim. And it casts doubt on others who have suffered the same types of things. And we do know that ritualistic abuse does take place. The NXIVM cult is a great example of this where we have very well established, documented evidence of highly ritualistic abuse. We know that most serial killers are very ritualistic in their approach, right? They take trophies, they take tokens. They have a ritual that they follow. They often have ways that they wash the bodies, that they prepare themselves. There are high levels of ritual to certain levels of evil. We do know that does happen. And so for those victims that have experienced that level of sexual abuse and evil spiritual, such as the NXIVM cult, when we don't handle the justice process well, we not only harm the victims that have suffered, we also cast doubt and make it so much more difficult for victims that have experienced that level of ritualistic abuse to be able to disclose and receive help. Those individuals who work in the victim advocacy space tend to be incredibly passionate about proper forensic interview techniques, because if we. We're not, we harm everybody in the process, including potentially somebody who's innocent.
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A
I'm glad you brought up nxivm, which is how I've always heard it referred to. I'm glad you brought that up because it's a really interesting example. It was highly ritualistic, Right. It was also very secular in its sort of worldview. Right. They weren't wearing black cloaks and lighting black candles and sacrificing goats or anything like that while they were doing these things. But they were literally branding women's genitals with literally with the. The initials of Keith Rainier, the head of this cult. One of the reasons I think that that's a useful example in all of this is that it would be very easy for someone to kind of hear that story from a distance and hear the language of ritualistic abuse and go, oh, well, it must have been like a. They must have all been Satanists. It's like, no, they were like weird secular humanist, really. They were like power of positive thinking cultists that were also doing sex trafficking and branding people. I mean, it's crazy when you say it that way, but that's exactly what was happening. So maybe you could speak to that a bit, because I think that one of the things that gets difficult in this conversation is when people hear the word ritualistic. We kind of go one place with the word ritualistic, right? We go very quickly to cloaks and black candles. What do you mean by that? Is there a demonstrable Nexium's one example? But are there demonstrable phenomena that we can point to to show how ritualistic abuse is happening in other Spheres.
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B
One of the most widespread academics on this space is a man named Michael Salter. He's not a Christian, but he has made it part of his life's work to be studying ritualistic abuse. And so he does really great work on the science of memory recall, the science of ritualistic abuse, the data behind it. What we do know, and one of the things that we do know, is that around 3% of disclosures to police are of ritualistic abuse. Now, that doesn't mean that they're all necessarily true or that there haven't been things in it. But if you talk to most experts who work in this field, they would tell you that they get a pretty significant amount of disclosures of ritualistic abuse from individuals that are highly stable, that are in stable, intact marriages, that are highly educated, they're raising successful children, and they've been in trauma therapy with good, skilled therapists who are not using the manipulative techniques that we see in the daycare cases. There is an extent to which we do have to grapple with when we're getting that consistent of a thread. It can't all be false. It can't. Especially when we do know the ways people have been in therapy, the stability that they have. We have long standing relationships with these individuals, and so we really do have to grapple with that. And then I think as Christians, we also have to ask the question of what is really demonic. Right? Now I understand the idea that the NXIVM cult was not demonic is. I think we have to ask the question of what does demonic influence look like. We hear the word ritualistic and we automatically think, oh, these are people that literally sit down, they say, I worship Satan. But most of what we see that has demonic overtones isn't necessarily somebody who's cognitively saying, I worship Satan. Right? It's something like the Nexium cult, where you have somebody who has taken the place of God. And I would argue there's some strong demonic influence in what we see in the NAXIVM cult. You have things like the serial killers that we see where they're literally cannibalistic. They are exhibiting very high levels of evil far beyond what we would consider normal, quote, unquote, murder. If I can say it that way, I would argue that we are potentially seeing demonic influence. When you see a serial killer who is cannibalizing his victims, I would argue that we are seeing demonic influence. When you look at the pagan sex cults from ancient times, of which there were many, they didn't call the gods that they worshiped, demonic, but sex was central to their worship of false gods. The abuse of children. I mean, Amy Carmichael's work in India and her rescue of these child temple prostitutes, I would argue that's demonic. That was cultic, that was ritualistic. It was an organized structure of trafficking little girls and tying sex to religion. And we do see a consistent thread through history of tying the abuse of children to religious worship, and we see it today. And so we have to at least sit with that reality and to grapple with the fact that that does exist, while at the same time asking, how do we set up good processes and good techniques that take into account this reality and also do it in a way that makes it safe for survivors to come forward? Because that's what we need for everybody where this is happening. We need to be able to do whatever we can to take care of these individuals and, if possible, to prosecute to the fullest extent. These do tend to be very difficult cases to prosecute because of the level of trauma. But if we don't sit with the reality that sex is often tied to religious overtones and that we do have levels of organization that we've seen all throughout history that has tied sexuality to religion. And look at how widespread our definition of demonic influence can be. If we don't sit with that reality, we can miss what's right in front of us sometimes and make it so much more difficult for individuals who have experienced that level of abuse to be able to speak up.
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A
There were a lot of reports out of Afghanistan, for instance, that a lot of the culture around the Taliban. Absolutely. You had this incredibly repressive culture for. For women and girls, but they also had this culture that sexualized adolescent, prepubescent teenage boys. So it is this phenomenon that exists across these various cultures. I mean, I wrote a book a couple years ago where I spent a lot of time talking about Elijah in particular, and kind of the blood and sex cults that he was confronting that faced Israel at the time. These were human trafficking operations, and it was child trafficking operations, and there was. There was child sacrifice involved, but there was also child sex trafficking involved. So this phenomenon's been with us for a long time.
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B
It has. And, Mike, here's the thing. A lot of it is in front of us more than we want to recognize. If we sit and listen to survivors of, quote, unquote, normal sexual abuse in church spaces. A very consistent thread that most of those victims experience is being told, this is what God has for you. You are special. You Are chosen. God has you for my bride. Right. We saw this with Mike Bickle and the IHOP case where he was consistently telling certain women that God had destined them to be his bride, that they were chosen, that they were special. We see this across the span of SBC abuse cases and PCA abuse cases in those contexts in normal, quote unquote.
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A
Normal disclosures for listeners who aren't familiar. Can you give us a little background on Mike Bickle and what you just described there? I think that could be helpful to kind of give some context here.
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B
So Mike Bickel was the pastor who founded the International House of Prayer, initially started in Kansas City. And several years ago a couple of women came forward and they started disclosing the amount of sexual abuse that was taking place at IHOP KC and how much had been covered up by the leaders. And an independent investigation was launched by a global mission group named Tikkun. They had co labored with IHOP and they essentially said, look, if we've co labored with this group, we need to be able to take a level of responsibility for the co laboring. We need to understand what's going on. And so because IHOP did not launch a proper independent investigation, this group of international leaders did. And there's a report out there called the Firefly Report. Now the Firefly Report was only able to go so far. What it really did was investigate the allegations against Mike and then in took allegations against other leaders and there were a very high number of calls that they were able to investigate or assess at a threshold level and find credible. And then they fully investigated the allegations against Mike Bickle. And you can read the Firefly Report, it's a public report and it scratches the surface of what was going on. But what we do see coming out of that is that Mike consistently tied his sexual abuse to religious language, that these women were chosen by God, that he was God's anointed, that they were going to be his bride, they were going to be the bride of heaven together. And he tied his sexual abuse of these women to spirituality, to God, to religion. But that's not unique to ihop. The vast majority of survivors in the SBC have alleged the exact same dynamics. That their abusers would abuse them and then they would lay their hands on them and they would pray over them that they were told they were God's anointed, that they were God's chosen, that they were special to a man of God and so that they needed to submit. And in those cases, we don't See the type of ritualistic abuse that we're talking about, but what we do see is that sexual abuse is very clearly tied to religion.
- [31:03]
A
It's ritualistic in a manner. It's not a black candle liturgy. It's a evangelical liturgy with evangelical set of prayers and 100%.
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B
There's. Krista Brown wrote a book called this Little Light of Mine, in which she describes what took place at the hands of an SBC pastor. And it was very ritualistic in the sense of he would abuse her, he would lay hands on her, he would pray for forgiveness and for her forgiveness and for repentance. He had a pattern he followed that was specifically religious, specifically tied to the gospel and Jesus. Her sexual abuse was entirely encased in religious overtones. And that's the norm when abuse takes place in churches. So this phenomenon of tying sexuality to religion and using God and using religion to facilitate sexual abuse didn't just take place during the time of Elijah. It's taking place right here, right now. The vast majority of allegations in evangelical spaces, sexual abuse, is tied specifically by the perpetrator to religion. And we have to grapple with that reality and what that means for the concept of ritualistic or religious abuse.
- [32:16]
A
I'm sure you and I could probably sit here and if we. If we named a window of dates, you know, 1981 to 1993, for instance, the window of the satanic panic, we could probably come up with dozens and dozens of allegations of abuse, like credible allegations of abuse or denominations in which abuse took place and all of this. I guess I'm curious, like, what role do you think, kind of the culture of evangelicalism, which was so reactionary in the 80s, was so worried about things like AIDS and rock and roll music and true love waits and teen pregnancy, and, you know, you kind of go down the line of this stuff. I mean, Mike Warnke was making millions of dollars in the. In the 80s, traveling around the country, telling this fantastical story about being a satanic cult leader, which was completely untrue. What role would you say the kind of fanaticism and panic plays in actually distracting us from abuse? Do abusers lean into that? So the story we told on the podcast, for instance, was like, Paul Pressler, right? Pressler was a culture warrior par excellence, Right? And very worried about, you know, the quote, unquote, feminist agenda, the gay agenda, and, you know, whatever else. And Pressler is credibly accused of abusing a number of young men over the years, including teenage boys. So to what extent, you know, in your experience to what extent does leaning into those kind of culture war, moral panic elements actually provide cover and enable abusers in situations like that?
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B
Oh, it absolutely does. We have to remember abusers are master manipulators, right? They know the audience, they know the community. And abusers that have the highest number of victims tend to be the most brilliant individuals. They tend to be lawyers and doctors and PhD. You know, they have PhDs, they're very highly educated, they're very manipulative, they're very intelligent. So they know their audience. And they are able to use fear, in particular, to be able to stoke concern, to be able to deflect, and to be able to manipulate those realities. My own abuser did this. When Larry was first, first accused by the by a non medical victim of sexual abuse, when she first disclosed, he actually sat down with her parents and he said, this didn't happen. But I'm so glad you said something, because if this ever does happen to you, here's what you need to do and here's how you need to disclose. And he actually coached the parents through what a proper disclosure would look like and affirmed that the little girl had spoken up. And even though it was just a misunderstanding, I'm so glad you've said something that you at least tried, because if somebody ever does really do something like this to you, it's so important that you speak up and you tell somebody. He 100% leaned into the perspective that there was a false allegation or that she had made it up or that she had just misunderstood to continue covering for what he was doing. He was a master manipulator, and abusers are master manipulators. The irony of Paul Pressler fueling fear of the LGBTQ agenda while he is still sexually assaulting boys in quite high numbers is just unspeakable. And you do see this over and over again where, again, all throughout history, where leaders who are excellent manipulators, they find what a community is afraid of, they stoke that fear, they harness all the energy, and they direct it toward that fear. And behind the scenes, it gives them the ability to do whatever they want and to come in and to be the solution to the problem that they've just created. And in Pressler's case, it very much put him in a position where we were getting so much benefit out of Paul Pressler's power that there was a level of shielding for him. Nobody wanted to acknowledge what he was doing. It was kept hush hush. It was kept very quiet because he was giving us so much of what we wanted that would have cost us to say something about what he was actually doing. So, yes, abusers absolutely use those things to fit their agenda, and they use it to manipulate it.
- [36:41]
A
Seems to me like one of the things the church needs is we've got to figure out what the canaries in the coal mine are in these kinds of situations. How do we create early warning systems, in a sense, in the church for the presence of people that are abusing? And do those things exist? Are there tools that exist? Is there technology that exists? I'm curious your thoughts on all that.
- [37:05]
B
Yeah, there absolutely is. And the first thing that we really have to do is to just be able to understand what causes something like the satanic panic, what the risks are and what they aren't. And the reality is that as humans, we always emotionally identify with the person that we could see ourselves being, right? And typically this is with the person that's in power. So if you put a jury in a courtroom with a sexual assault victim at one table and a perpetrator at the other, especially a perpetrator that's relatively well respected or he's got a place in the community, the jury is immediately going to identify emotionally with the perpetrator. What if I were falsely accused? And the reason partly why we do this is because if we emotionally identify with the victim, we have to acknowledge our own vulnerability. This is particularly a phenomenon in female spaces where women tend to be even harsher on female sexual assault victims than men are. Because if there is something that we can do that sets us apart from that victim, I wouldn't behave like that victim did. I would handle it differently. I wouldn't go where she went. I would do what she didn't do. Then it puts us in a position where I'm never going to be that woman. I'm never going to have to be that vulnerable. And that's a natural human instinct to identify with the person in power, not the person who's victimized, because it gives us a level of false security that that's not going to be us. And so we have to understand what types of things cause the satanic panic and what types of things are the real risk. The reality is that my son is statistically much more likely to be sexually assaulted than he is to be a victim of false allegations. The reality is that memories tend to be accurate, especially if we haven't used poor investigative techniques. We need to learn what scholars to look to so that we can become educated. Ross Kite has actually written somebody, a scholar, who's written an excellent book on this phenomenon, Satanic Panic, in these daycare cases. It's called the Witch Hunt Narrative. And he's looking at how do we accurately diagnose what's taken place here? We have to know what experts to not listen to. I would argue that Elizabeth Loftus is not an expert that we should be listening to. Elizabeth has testified on behalf of Ted Bundy. She's testified on behalf of Robert Durst in his 2020 trial. She took the stand against the Epstein victims and specifically argued that memories can be implanted for the sake of financial for which there is absolutely no scientific backing. And she has twisted and distorted the science substantially and has made a career out of decimating victims and supporting and fighting for the most vile people in our society, including, and right down to Ted Bundy, Harvey Weinstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and over 300 others. We have to know where to go to get good information. And then in addition to that, we have to know how to set up good processes. And this is part of why the independent inquiry process, when a church can access it, is really going to be so critical because pastors aren't equipped to be able to investigate. And they're not memory experts. And that's okay, they don't have to be. But if we don't have an independent inquiry process, that does bring in experts who are qualified to be able to do that assessment, who have experience in credibility assessments and memory recall and know how to use pre proper forensic interview techniques so that the information can come forward in a way that you can actually weigh all the evidence from both sides. If you don't do that, then you are unlikely to ever get to the evidence that's out there or to get any help, to give any guidance as to what steps you need to take. And that's part of why I'm so very passionate about that independent inquiry process. When it's properly done, it's done by individuals who hold multiple professional licenses. They're typically attorneys who are former sex crimes prosecutors. They typically also hold private investigative licenses. So they're regulated by the state across multiple levels. They have multiple levels of training, decades of experience, and they're in a process. In this independent inquiry process, it's that process of let's hear from both sides. One person sounds right until another comes and examines him. You need testimony of two or three witnesses. Scripture defines a witness as anyone who has come to know of the matter, a prior disclosure. We see evidence in Scripture of using documentary evidence, physical evidence. You need somebody who's skilled in evidentiary practices and techniques and knows how to get those, get to that information in a way that's trauma informed and safe so that we can execute biblical justice. And if we don't utilize that process, then we do put churches and ministries in a substantial place of risk because pastors often aren't qualified to do that process. And when it's somebody that you're close to, it's very difficult to do that in an unbiased way. And so wisdom would dictate that we rely on other members of the body of Christ and others who are benefactors of common grace, who have those skill sets that follow principles of biblical justice so that we can get the help that we need in a way that is safe for everybody who's involved and actually does protect everyone who's involved, including those who are accused. When we don't do that, we poorly serve everybody in that situation.
- [42:14]
A
I remember years ago, I think it was David French that I heard say this. I'm willing to bet like 99% it was David French who said this. He said, one of the challenges that churches find themselves in when they have discovered some kind of abuse taking place inside their congregation, one of their instincts is very reasonably. He didn't say this critically, very reasonably. One of their instincts is to call the lawyer. And he said, you know, and I say this to you as a. You're a lawyer. For listeners who haven't coughed out yet, you're. Rachel's a lawyer. Their instinct is to call the lawyer. And what David said was, he said, what they don't understand is that when the lawyer comes to the church, the lawyer's not interested primarily in justice. They're primarily interested in protecting the institution. And so you almost need, I mean, this would be sort of the third party review kind of thing. You need someone who's going to come in who's disinterested in the reputation of the institution. They're interested in the truth, and they're going to pursue, you know, sort of an investigation and an understanding of what's taken place in such a way that's very sort of judgment neutral in the sense that they're not on anybody's team. They're interested primarily in the truth. When you hire a lawyer particularly, what churches often do is hire law firms that are also like really good at pr, right? That's what often happens when sexual abuse happens inside churches. They hire these like, crisis management firms that are sort of hybrid PR and legal organizations. They're not interested in getting to justice. How can that be kind of intervened in a church situation.
- [44:03]
B
So what that really takes is a leadership team that is asking the question, how do we do the right thing in the wisest way possible? Because most of the time the first question is, how do we protect the money, the assets, the reputation? How do we make sure that we don't invite liability? And when we're asking that question, what we're really putting the priority on is the money in the church. And here's the thing Jesus told us over and over and over again. You cannot serve both God and mammon. Only one gets to be your God. And when the first question is, how do we protect the assets? Even when we dress it up really nicely, how do we protect the assets? Because we want to take care of our missionaries, Taking care of our missionaries is a very good thing. But you cannot serve both God and money. God does not need our protection. You, he demands our obedience. And the question that we need to be asking is, how do we do what is right in the wisest way possible? And David is correct that when you bring in an attorney, the vast majority of attorneys are not asking that question. Now, they may dress it up very nicely. You can't say XYZ happened because that invites liability. And if you lose money, you can't support your missionaries. And we all want to support our missionaries. They may dress it up very nicely. But here's what happens in law school. In law school, in legal ethics, the preeminent legal ethical responsibility that an attorney has is to act as a fiduciary, to act in the best interest of your client. Now, I would argue that acting as a fiduciary should take into account a much more robust and multifaceted understanding. Who are you as individuals? Who are you as an entity? What is your moral compass? What is your reputational value? Can you do the ministry of bringing the gospel to the nations if you're not making sure that your missionaries that you're sending with your money aren't raping kids in the process? Can you do what you are passionate about doing if you're not doing the right thing in the wisest way possible? That our understanding of being a fiduciary ought to be so much more than protect the money and the reputation? But in law school, pretty much, you are taught, especially in my generation, and before that, being a fiduciary means you protect the assets and you protect the reputational upfront costs. And so you have an entire generation of Christian attorneys that has flipped its moral compass on its head. To do what is right is to protect my client. Protecting my client means I protect their assets. Therefore, when I help bury child sexual assault, when I don't turn over documents that I should turn over, when I don't tell the truth about what happened, when I keep it quiet, when I minimize, when I do that, I'm protecting the assets of my organization. The assets are being used to fund missionaries. Therefore I am doing what is morally right. But that is the polar opposite of what Jesus tells us to do. He tells us to bring the darkness into the light. He tells us that he hates unjust scales and weights. He tells us to show no partiality. He never once, not ever, commands us to protect money so that we can take the money and do good things. He tells us to obey him. And so you have to have a leadership team that is geared that way. And then ideally, somebody that can come in and that can work with all of the people involved to start with the question, how do I do the right thing? Thing in the wisest way possible? And depending on what we're looking at, that can look like a number of things. There are cases that I work on as a consultant where we do have an outstanding criminal investigation. And so in order to protect the chain of evidence, we sit down and we talk with the survivor and we say, hey, we want to make sure that your criminal process is protected. Here's how we're going to try to structure this so that we don't mess with the evidentiary chain and potentially get in the way of criminal justice taking place. And if that doesn't work, if the criminal justice system doesn't do what it needs to do, and the vast majority of the time it doesn't, here's the next steps that we're going to take. And so it is a very collaborative, trauma informed approach that's centered around how do we do the right thing in the wisest way possible. But picking up the phone and calling your church's attorney by and large, most of the time is not going to get you there. Because most attorneys are not trauma informed. They haven't worked with survivors before, and they have a very twisted and myopic understanding of what it means to act in the best interest of the client. And I've seen this play out in so many ways, even up to and including counter suing child sexual abuse victims for court costs and damages. And when I sat down with this, one particular pastor said, can you explain to me why you put this in your answer to the plaintiff's civil Litigation claim. He said, well, my attorney told me it was boilerplate. It's boilerplate in a construction accident. It's not boilerplate for a 12 year old who's being raped. Right. But the attorney was not trained in trauma, wasn't trained in any of this type of litigation. And so he ended up doing a massive disservice to this church because he's just approaching this like any other civil litigation claim. And the reality is that the heartbeat of every survivor I have ever worked with is I don't want somebody else to go through what I went through. I don't want somebody else to be harmed by the church the way I was harmed. The vast majority of survivors that I work with who have been harmed in the church are still Christians, they're still conservative. They desperately want the church to do this. Well, they don't want to be the enemy, they want to help. And the church turns it adversarial by taking an adversarial approach. And survivors get to the point where they go, look, there are no options for me. You're not working with me to find out what really happened. Nobody's asking the question, how do we keep this from happening again? You've turned this adversarial. So I have nothing. I have no way to move the needle in your approach to abuse other than now to bring a civil claim. But survivors want the church to do it well. They don't sue because they're mad and angry. They sue because they're desperate for the church to do it better. And the church has demonstrated that they're just going to batten down the hatches, they're going to engage in protectionism, they're going to stay away from any kind of process where the truth might come out because their attorney is telling them, well, that's not in your best interest. Right. And ultimately it does incredible damage to the survivor and to the church.
- [50:30]
A
I'm really especially glad you said what you said about how most of these victims are still believers and they're still connected to the church. I think that gets framed in a really pernicious way by people who would be, I guess we would describe them as resistant to reform and accountability in our churches and denominations. It's often framed as like, well, these are just deconstructed exvangelicals and they hate Jesus and you know, they hate the gospel. And it sort of reads in this motivation that the thing I always say when it comes up too is, I mean, this is related, is that people who listen to the rise and fall of Mars Hill. There were maybe two voices on that entire podcast that would not identify as Christians these days, like, on the entire series. Yes, some of the people who identified as Christians have foul mouths, but they still identify as Christians. Hey, they had foul mouths when they were at Mars Hill 15 years ago.
- [51:29]
B
Mark had a foul mouth.
- [51:30]
A
Mark had a foul mouth. Exactly.
- [51:31]
B
So there's that.
- [51:33]
A
And so I think part of the reason that that's important is that there's this credibility impulse on the part of people who want to sort of resist reforms or say that the reforms are, like, motivated by. Well, this is about feminism. This is the SBC thing, really. That whole thing is all about just trying to, like, Trojan horse feminist theology into the SBC and all this kind of nonsense. That's just absolutely not true on any level. You can see how ridiculous some of those claims are once you actually talk to a handful of the victims and the victim's advocates. So. Which is why I wanted to point that out and stress that in this conversation.
- [52:16]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, and the other reality is my parents used to tell me all the time, don't shoot the messenger. Right. If it's true, it's true. And we are commanded to pursue the truth. There is nothing in Scripture where it says God hates unjust weights and measures unless the person that's being treated unjustly is not a Christian. That's not what Proverbs says. That's not what the Levitical law says. That's not what the New Testament says. If it's true, it's true, and we need to deal with it. And part of the way that we are commanded to reflect who God is is to be people of justice, is to be people that protect the oppressed and stand for the downtrodden and rescue those who are being led away to slaughter. That is part of how we are supposed to display the gospel to a watching world. And so when you account for the fact that 25% of women are going to suffer sexual abuse by the time they reach adulthood, and you couple that with a church that says, my God is holy, but acts like he doesn't care about sexual abuse, I serve a God of justice, but I don't care about what happened to 25% of you, including those of you that it happened to in the pulpit or by people in the pulpit. We have done a horrible job representing an all holy God. And that ought to be something that we take very seriously if we really believe that we are not to take the Lord's name in Vain. If we really believe that we are to be his hands and feet and that we are tangible representations of him. And there is so much fear mongering around this issue. You're exactly right. Anybody who works in this issue is immediately categorized as liberal, feminist, deconstructed. Doesn't matter how conservative you are. I go to a 1689. I'm a member of a 1689 London Baptist confession Church. I'm a homeschooling graduate who married a homeschooling graduate who has an M. Div. And a THM for one of the most conservative seminaries in the country who's writing his PhD dissertation on penal substitutionary atonin using John Owen. We homeschool our children. You don't get a lot more conservative than that. You just like, I don't know what other box you want me to check.
- [54:16]
A
I know the joke. You've never heard me say this joke, but the joke is that like, you're like one degree removed from like wearing a doily on your head.
- [54:26]
B
Pretty much, yeah. I mean, really, like, what else do you want me to do? And that's not enough to save me from liberal, demonic, hysterical feminist. Right. But it's so much easier if you don't really engage with the issues. It's so much easier if you caricature. It's so much easier if you use sound bites and red flags and, you know, and smoke screens and all these. If you. If you just push it over here and you can make it this other thing from these other people, then we don't have to deal with the reality of what's happening right in front of us. Right? And that's a much easier job than sitting with the reality of what's taking place in our own community and having these hard conversations where we can ask questions like, hey, how do we avoid what we see in the satanic panic? But how do we also sit with the reality that sexual abuse tied to religious overtones is a real thing, that ritualistic abuse can be a real thing, that organized abuse can be a real thing, that it's happening in our churches, that it's happening in our Sunday schools and with our pastors and with our parishioners? And how do we do both of those things so that we are pursuing justice for everybody who's involved? I think one of the most important things we have to do is grapple with reality in front of us and be able to accurately diagnose the problem. In my line of work, I have encountered false claims, usually from very traumatized individuals who are projecting or have severe mental health issues. I also encounter a lot of police abuse, police abuse against victims and police abuse against alleged perpetrators and innocent people. I see both. And so we have to be able to accurately diagnose why are we seeing this kind of abuse of authority in both directions, what's happening in that kind of abuse of authority, and how do we deal with that? How do we start protecting against abuse of authority? Because we do see it. And so, again, it's not that we don't need to wrestle with these issues, we absolutely do. It's that we need to move away from sound bite answers and the neat, convenient little boxes that make us feel better, but prevent us from having to dig into the hard issues. And just on a practical level, when we do see a lot of the abuse of power against alleged perpetrators, it tends to be in highly racial contexts or in communities that are very impoverished, again, very vulnerable communities that have less resources, that are suffering from stigmas and stereotypes. And there's very little recourse to abuse of power in either direction, whether it's abuse of power against victims or abuse of power against alleged perpetrators. We have to be able to accurately diagnose why we see those abuses of power and then ask the question, what do we need to do to start protecting against those abuses of power? I think one of the issues that we have to start digging into is sovereign immunity and the reality, or qualified immunity, as it's often called now, and the reality that law enforcement is almost completely immune from any form of accountability or liability when they abuse their power in either direction. So we've created a system where we have an entire branch of government that has all the authority and all the power, right down to deadly weapons. But we have at the same time created a system where there is no mechanism for personal or corporate accountability. We've really got to grapple with that because there is abuse of authority happening in both directions. And if we are going to be Christians that are commanded to pursue justice, we have to be willing to see where authority is abused and to move away from the sound bites and to move away from the inconvenient boxes and really dig into what do we as a people need to be doing so that we are standing for justice.
- [58:07]
A
That's a great place to end. Thank you so much, Rachel. Good to be with you. Good to see you again.
- [58:11]
B
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
- [58:14]
A
Devil in the Deep Blue Sea is a production of Christianity Today. It's hosted and written by Mike Kosper, produced by Mike Kosper and Rebecca Sebastian with production assistance from Dawn Adams Sound design and mix engineering by TJ Hester Sound design, animation and video by Steve Scheidler Graphic design Nim Ben Rubin, Eric Petrick and Mike Kosper are executive producers of CT Media Podcasts. Matt Stevens is our senior producer. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review wherever you listen. It'll help more people find the show. Thanks for listen. Ram.