For Our Daughters

the loud girls just might inherit the earth and lay to rest the worst parts of church

I thought I was slick.

The adults from our hippy-dippy church were confronting a missionary who had secretly charged impoverished people for the free medical care and ministry the church had sacrificed to give.

Pretending to play nearby, my little girl ears strained to hear what the defense of this dastardly act was.

He didn’t have one, in my memory.

He wasn’t poor, having enriched himself off various church ministries. He was persuasive and in clear command of his senses. He did it, for the same reason the fictional husbands in the Stepford Wives movie killed their wives and replaced them with perfect robot dolls: Because he could.

This week, a film was released by a writer who detailed how one of the most powerful groups in America organizes its power and hides its abuse. These same men are seeking vast amounts of political power to shape and control not only the women within their churches, but outside of it.

Her name is Kristin Du Mez. The documentary, streaming open to the public for free right now, was developed from the last chapter of her hit book Jesus and John Wayne.

Du Mez opened many people’s eyes to men in the Evangelical church and the movement that has consolidated their own social and political power on the backs of everyone else.

But here, Du Mez seeks to show how everyone else looks the other way or gathers around these men and most importantly the women who have had enough of the lies.

To my surprise, every Sunday instead of sleeping in or moseying around Spring Street with my nose pressed against a Sephora display or museum glass, I take myself to a non-denominational church a good 45 minutes away from where I live. I do not love this fact for me.

I sit with the visitors in the back because I am routinely late and my days of jumping in church are over. I love the people who do at the front though.

I sit with the visitors in the back on a burned little butt that is grateful for this community, but with very little faith that it can and will protect me when I need it.

The first time you hear of a so-called godly man abusing his position you think he’s the worst person ever in a really good community that happened to be targeted.

About the 16th time you’ve heard this story in yet another church, watched the canned half-arsed apologies, and seen the same pattern of cover up occur, you realize it isn’t just the one man.

These guys aren’t bugs in the system. They are products of it. This is the fruit of sexualizing little girls and theologizing women’s bodies and minds into things that must be controlled tightly by men specifically. It is the fruit of mandating spiritual hierarchies through gender.

And it is hard to trust your life and body to a Church culture that has routinely sold women to the highest bidder of the tithe money, nasty politicians who promise to loudly hate the people you hate too, and the men who realize these communities will forgive you endlessly.

So here is how this can change. We end the silence and we amplify those brave enough to tell their stories. We don’t trust these places, we learn to articulate and critique the ways they structure power, and we refuse to put our whole trust in men.

I still show up to church because God and I have this deal.

I take the risk of community and enter into the space the church creates for us to pause, learn, and reset. I pray and am prayed for. I eat my free empanada and leave enough for others even though I do not feel generous about the empanadas. I am hugged and I give hugs. I give these people a chance and they give me even more chances. We take, as Madeleine L’Engle said, the risk of birth. It has meant the world to me. It has meant that I do not bolt at the first sign of reasonable disagreement. It has meant putting roots down and letting people in. This is a blessing.

Yet. I keep my eyes open. That missionary was my first experience in a long list of experiences of men walking into my church and taking it and the women in it for everything we had.

But I don’t think we should cede the beauty of what is born in and through the community to the people who angle to take advantage of its most vulnerable parts.

I don’t think simply replicating the same church structure with new shiny people is going to save us from predators.

Looking closely at the theology, the power structures we bless, and the testimony of brave survivors can help us reclaim and protect the spaces we grow in.

I want you to know you can leave. And you can stay.

Keep your standards high for yourself, no matter what leadership may or may not do. I know I am safe to come to church because I trust that when and if I do clock an abusive culture I will leave and God will go before me and behind me and beside me. No one community or configuration of power is worth my sanity, peace, and bodily autonomy.

So I stay, because I know I can always go.

I hope you watch with me this weekend For Our Daughters.

When we know the patterns, we can be more strategic about breaking them. We can drive a stake through the kind of toxic male headship that preys on us. I am grateful for all the women who made this film possible.

What we want for our daughters is greater than what these abusers have wanted to take from them. What I have seen play out time and time again is simply not good enough. And quite frankly, the way I see many of these men scrambling, I think they know this. The days of getting away with it are grinding to a halt, one testimony at a time. If we are brave enough to listen, learn, and turn, we will give our daughters what they have always deserved.

Jael and Sisera, by Artemisia Gentileschi, 1620, oil on canvas.