Of Course Church Will Hurt Us: When Abuse Isn't Personal
Examining the Traumatic Church Discourse, Part Four
In this, the fourth installment examining the recent rise of traumatic church discourse, we take a look at one of the big questions that’s been raised:
What about abuse that happens, but isn’t a matter of active intent?
The Importance of Intention: Ground Zero of the Moral Life
Since the first major wave of stories about abuse in the Catholic Church began to break in early 2002, it’s been impossible to think about what it means to belong to a church without thinking of the possibility of abuse happening. There’s no reason to try to unthink this: the world has always been the kind in which the powerless were abused by the powerful.
These kinds of abuses seem fairly straightforward. But, as many of you have raised since then, what if abuse still happens but is not intended as such? In the first of this series, I offered a distinction between “abuse” and “ordinary harm” which turned on this very distinction: abuse as that which is intended, ordinary harm as that which is unintended. For the most part, I still stand by this distinction, but we need to say far more here about two cases readers have brought up:
1) when an action is not seen by the perpetrator as abusive
2) when abuse is not a matter of one person’s action, but is “in the water”, the ethos of a culture.
One of the great recoveries of the 20th century was by Elizabeth Anscombe in her book Intention in which she makes the case that two events can be very different events, and the difference is at the level of what is intended. We act, and can narrate what we are doing without observing it, but by offering an account of why we did what we did. Absent this insight, morality becomes simply a matter of efficiency: your reasons be damned—do the good by any means necessary!1
For the technocrat, this logic is fine: the point of morality is to do the thing, not quibble about why it’s being done. But with this approach is this: intention is how we become moral creatures. We aim toward a good or bad end, and in the process of that aiming, become more capable of moving toward that end. If you habitually aim toward good ends, all the better, but if you habitually aim toward bad ends, you become more of a devil than you were before.2 We build up the capacities of patience, of acting prudently, of persevering—and the process of moving toward one end and not another is all part of what happens because of intention: the deliberate moving on a course of action, which shapes how we deliberate and what we value in those deliberations.
Every action is a matter of an intended course of action toward a perceived end. When I run a stop light, it’s because I was paying attention to one thing, but not another; my thinking was being directed toward the audiobook or the scenery, and not the angry red light above me. When I raise my voice at my children, I am making a choice to intervene in misbehavior in this way and not another.3 This is moral action 101: we do those things which we intend to do, more or less.
Now: this does not mean that every action we take has the intended effect. If I run the red light, I mean to get through to the other side, not get t-boned in the intersection. If I raise my voice, I am meaning to bring compliance to my request for-the-one-billionth-time to go clean your room, and not the inevitable tears that come.
But the important point is this: intention is invaluable in naming what our moral actions are.
In Scripture, intention is what helps distinguish between murder and manslaughter, between inviting someone over to flatter them or to be hospitable, between, between lying and speaking in ignorance. The effect is the same: someone has died, a meal has been served, an untruth is in the world. But in terms of what kind of repair is called for, intention makes every bit of difference.
When Abuse isn’t Intended
So, what happens when an action isn’t intended as abuse? It’s one thing to say that a person acts toward their own gratification and maliciously toward others. But it’s another to say that a person doesn’t see what they’re doing as being abusive. What then? Is it still abuse even if it wasn’t meant that way?
On the one hand, yes, obviously: people can be hurt in ways which are something other than “ordinary harm”, the process of sinful creatures bumping up against one another. I have friends whose lives have been ruined and the party seems blithely unaware that anything was wrong. Several of you have told me in the last weeks of something like this scenario: a minister was fired for activities which could be narrated in multiple ways:
Was that comment meant flirtatiously? Was that decision a personal attack? Is this pattern of behavior malicious or do they just not get it?
Sometimes, behaviors violate professional or understood standards, and the not-understanding generates abuse, whether meant or not. In these cases, we find ourselves at a kind of epistemic impasse: one who has been harmed in ways that surpass the ordinary, and one who does not see it as such. We can appeal here to objective codes of conduct, to laws or ordinances to sort this out, and these are sometimes helpful. But here, the problem of intent becomes more profound because the damage is greater: there seems to be something law can’t account for, even when the damage is profound.
The way forward is not to abandon intent, for reasons I’ve named above. The way forward is an appeal for repentance and conversion, not to a better law, but to a better and deeper love for one another in and through the image of Christ, because our self-understanding—my intention— is not inviolate. The way that I take my own action is not sacrosanct. I can narrate my own actions to myself well—I can make sense of my own behavior—but that doesn’t rule out that I’m deceived, or that the profoundly harmed person in front of me isn’t harmed. And the damaged person in front of me is a call for me to repent.
Ultimately, our intentions are lived it out socially: they are accepted and empowered, or challenged. I take this to be where intention goes to church: as Bonhoeffer puts it, a church -community is a body in which we will toward one another, and in the process of us willing toward one another, we learn what it means to will toward one another well.4 The only way abuse is prevented there is by letting that face-to-face encounter be the true gift and the hard opportunity of naming what is empowered and what is not.
When Abuse is No One’s Intention
The second scenario that several have named is something like the following:
What about when people are profoundly harmed and it’s the matter of a culture?
Deconversion narratives tend to follow particular tracks, and one of those has to do with harm received in church, some of it particular and personal and some of it cultural. It’s not one particular person being malicious, or even anyone acting with malice: it’s the ethos of the whole, the baked-in cultural presumptions, the way that a social body behaves. In this way, intention is what individual people mean by way of belonging to a group and nurturing its ethos, but when people are hurt by it, the intention of harm doesn’t belong to any one person in particular.
At one level, every social body works in a way in which what it believes works its way through whole like yeast in bread dough. No social body believes everything, or believes every way about every thing. Over time, social bodies become cohesive not just in their care for one another, but because of the mental frameworks which help make that common care possible. Over time, we call these denominations: all committed to Jesus, but committed to the same Jesus in ways which help their gathering be cohesive and coherent.5
In saying this, I’m not making an apology for social bodies being corrosive: it’s just accounting for how that is. People intend to care for one another and to do the things necessary to maintain those bonds, and over time, harmful things can become normed in pretty ordinary ways. It’s also, conversely, the way that virtue becomes supported in pretty amazing ways—in this case, love just becomes an ordinary feature of caring for the people you’re with. And in both cases, it frequently takes something different to be able to name those virtues and vices for what they are: saints no longer see what they do as all that virtuous, or villians what they do as vicious because it’s the proverbial second-nature of being in this community.
When someone who doesn’t fit those presumptions enters, or develops from within, it can either be an opportunity for a hospitable give-and-take, or it can be the time that breaks someone. This past week, I was reading Benedict’s Rule, and one of the things which struck me about it was the way that it navigates this particular dynamic. There’s ample instruction on the subtle and humble ways that a community navigates its own internal faults, paired with warnings to those who would enter in that entering in will be difficult at first: once you have a well-established rhythm to a community, newcomers (and new visions of the community) can be both an opportunity, or a threat, and it is never certain which will be which.
The presence of ones who are strange to any particular church culture can be an opportunity for great transformation, for everyone. Whether a church is capable of that wisdom is a different question. It’s my prayer that more would be. And if you find yourself in those churches incapable of being prudentially hospitable? Dust your feet off and do not forget that Jesus remains true, and will help you find those places.6 One of the great joys of my job is accompanying my students on that journey. There's no prize for remaining in Laodicea, no value in suffering for its own sake. Remaining in a place where people love you but disagree with you, are committed to you but think you're wrong? That's a different story.
There are many reasons for opposing this that I won’t get into, except to name three: 1) it reduces ethics to a right outcome (which is frequently out of our hands to control), 2) it allows for horrific actions to be undertaken in pursuit of a just cause, and 3) it doesn’t matter whether the action makes you into a terrible person or not, so long as something good happens, however defined.
I’ll dispense here one of the great pieces of parenting advice given to me by my parents, and it’s one that I repeat to my kids frequently: “There are two ways do your chores: right, and over.” The first is the way of virtue, attending to not only the finishing point, but the quality of the work. The second is a way in which we leave quality to the side, and just focus on finishing. This leads to a lot of gnashing of teeth, and lots of delays on doing the things they actually want to do, like building Legos or jumping on the trampoline.
Please don’t parent like this. It’s a bad idea unless there’s imminent danger to your children.
Want to learn more? I wrote a book on this.
Part of what makes America interesting (and impossible?) is that it tries to do exactly this—care for its members while also allowing its members to disagree on matters substantive and inconsequential. A person can be a whatever they want to be, protected by law, so long as they pay their taxes. It’s always the money.
I hesitate to say “and work to help it be that place”. This places a consistent and disproportionate burden on those who are different to make things better, more hospitable. Don’t expect that those who are different should have to constantly battle to find a home: walk with them in finding it.