When girls and women are taught that submitting to men without question is what God designed them to do, men have few checks on their power. Too often, evangelical pastors and other powerful men took advantage of that, abusing women sexually and emotionally — and then either blaming the survivors or castigating their credibility when survivors sounded the alarm.
Sarah Stankorb’s powerful new book, “Disobedient Women: How a Small Group of Faithful Women Exposed Abuse, Brought Down Powerful Pastors, and Ignited an Evangelical Reckoning,” tells the stories of those survivors and the advocates who spoke up for them. Years before #churchtoo became a hashtag, Stankorb was researching and writing about sexual abuse for publications like Washington Post Magazine, Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you start on this quest?
Beginning the research and discovering Christian patriarchy started with one story. Many years ago, someone pointed me to a really interesting crowdfunding effort. That was Vyckie Garrison, who had been in a Quiverfull environment, and she had many children. She was leaving both her husband and her church, she didn’t have the funds she needed to support such a large family, and she was just about to be named 2014 Atheist of the Year. I didn’t know what the word Quiverfull even meant, but I looked it up and read her blog. That opened the door.
In case readers don’t know what Quiverfull is, could you explain its teachings and its popularity?
It’s a philosophy of reproduction that treats the womb and what the womb can produce as God’s blessing. So if you use birth control or your husband has a vasectomy, you’re blocking God’s blessing. So the more children you have, the more blessings you have. It comes with a lot of assurances that you’ll be able to support all of these children.
Underlying a lot of it is this idea that Christians need to reproduce as much as possible to keep the Christian population large and overtake other populations of believers. Also baked in, which was very important in Vyckie’s case, was this idea of martyrdom — that as a woman, your way of creating Christians in the world is through procreation. And even if you die in the process, then that’s a way of becoming a martyr.
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You also talk about the idea of the stay-at-home daughter, which was a movement I had not heard of before.
It’s encouraging girls to stay home within their family, under the authority of their father, training to be a mother. It also resulted in girls helping their very overwhelmed mothers with homemaking and raising younger siblings. In these families you really shouldn’t go off to college; college and universities are where you learn feminism and Marxism.
So having a stay-at-home daughter is a way of keeping these young adult women in an authoritative situation until they enter a courtship that’s parent-approved, where they can marry a young man and move under that man’s authority. It was a stopgap to discourage young women from learning any other worldview than what they were raised with. But it also really just reinforced that idea of male authority.
Many Americans were introduced to this idea of courtship through the Duggar family. You spend some time on them in the book. In what way did the Duggar children’s upbringing facilitate the abuse that Josh perpetrated on his sisters, and then how that abuse was handled?
One of the ways is that once the family knew about the abuse, instead of doing what many families would do, which is to seek someone licensed in therapy to walk those young women through a difficult process, Josh was sent to a training center run by Bill Gothard and the IBLP (Institute for Basic Life Principles). That’s where Gothard’s ministry took in many young people for misbehavior and bucking authority. But here we’re talking about sexual assault; we’re talking about a crime. And it was not treated that way.
But the Duggars served as the poster children for Bill Gothard’s ministry, for this whole way of life. And like you saw in the documentary “Shiny Happy People,” shiny people have a few flaws, and it was not all as pleasant as it was shown on reality TV. Many of these families, including not just the Duggars but others who were not as well known, had to maintain a certain credibility within their religious subculture, which meant trying their best not to show the ugly side of life. If you show anything negative, you’ll lose status within the ministry. I think that was also likely a part of why the Duggars didn’t come forward about the abuse, because they didn’t go public until forced to.
Your book does an excellent job of trying to understand this subculture in a deep way rather than just critiquing it. What might women find attractive about this lifestyle that is fairly closed, with clearly defined gender roles? What’s in it for the women who stay?
That’s a great question. Many families enter this worldview through home schooling. Sometimes they start home schooling for a religious reason, but maybe they just want to teach their kids themselves. They go to a conference and learn that keeping children at home is best if they want to be godly, whatever that means to them. There’s plenty of material that infuses these ideas in their curriculum. It requires a heck of a lot of sacrifice, but they’re willing to do it because they want it to be good in the eyes of God.
I’ll also say I’ve heard from more than a few sources that the gendered power dynamics within their particular families were not as clear-cut as you would think on paper. Sometimes, it’s the women who are pushing the whole Christian patriarchy thing, when the mother is the one bringing the ideas home and almost forcing the father into it. And maybe those men are not naturally people who want that kind of absolute authority. When they feel like, “Well, I have to, this is what this minister I trust tells me I’m supposed to do,” it often becomes extreme. It’s almost as if they’re trying on personality traits that don’t belong to them. You have a woman trying to be submissive, but also trying to force her family members into these roles, and you have a man who feels obligated to be a certain kind of Christian leader. It becomes a mess of people trying to be things they’re not.
Many of these cases of abuse are situated in the rise of “purity culture” from roughly the 1970s to the early 2000s. Did purity culture contribute to abuse in evangelicalism?
I think purity culture definitely plays a role. There’s pressure for girls and boys both to avoid any sort of sexual contact, even front-to-front hugs, and to avoid kissing until marriage in the more extreme cases. But the responsibility falls primarily on the women and girls, not only to shield themselves from sin, but also to keep men or boys from even thinking about anything sexual.
Many of these girls haven’t had any information about sex. They don’t know what’s normal; they don’t know what’s healthy; they don’t know what consent is. That’s just not explained. Then when the abuse does happen, they feel so guilty because they feel like it’s their responsibility.
After that amount of guilt, you don’t typically step forward to say, “This is what happened to me.” Often, even if they do step forward within their churches, their pastors blame them. I’m thinking of someone like Julio Woodson, whose youth pastor assaulted her. He was also the person who taught her True Love Waits class. So when he got her alone and asked her to perform sex acts, she assumed that meant he wanted to marry her. That was the only context she had.
The following day she reported to her church and was asked, “Did you participate?” Very clearly the blame fell to her. He was eventually sent off to another church. They had a wonderful going-away reception for him. The way Jules was treated was so awful that it almost destroyed her. There are so many stories.
Some of those stories were the multiple victims who came forward with accusations about Bill Gothard himself.
Yes. They thought they were alone until they saw another story on the internet from someone else who had been plucked out of the ministry and brought to work for Bill Gothard. These women describe being brought in alone with Bill Gothard, him putting his hands on them, him rubbing his feet on them, things that should not happen in a workplace or anywhere without permission.
But most had no context for any of this. They felt uncomfortable, but he was such an important figure. He was as close to God as anyone they knew, and because of that, they could not fathom that he was being predatory. It wasn’t until they saw another person’s story online and then started to come forward one by one that they began to recognize it was a pattern.
It must have been difficult to spend so many years hearing story after story of abuse. Toward the end of the book you offer a useful distinction of being trauma-informed, but not trauma-absorptive. Can you explain that?
It’s vital for me to go into an interview reminding myself of what my role is. I’m to be a listener. I have to pay close attention to every moment they’ve described. I need to keep my mind a step outside. That way I can fact-check, I can say, “When exactly did that happen? Do you remember what time of day it was? What were you looking at?” If they mentioned something financial, I need to be thinking about whether they have paperwork to back up what they’ve told me. So, I focus on who else I might need to talk to and how best to verify their story.
That kind of dual mindfulness does keep me a layer out, but there are times when I’ll get to the end of the day and it’ll hit me that I’ve just talked to someone who’s been through something awful. I try my best not to absorb it because philosophically I know it’s not mine. It would be wrong for me to wear all of the pain of these people as if it’s my own.
Jana Riess is the author of several books and a senior columnist for Religion News Service. She has a PhD in American religious history from Columbia University.
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16 Respuestas
A more unbiblical treatise on family and womanhood and young adult sexuality I have not read. What, for heaven’s sake, do you do with Psalm 127 and with the admonition to teach children God’s ways at mealtimes and when they rise and go to bed, found in Deuteronomy? The article seems to encourage promiscuity in young folks, eventhough I’m sure that was not the intention of the writer. We had ten children, birthed seven of them at home, homeschooled them and they were all virgins when they married. We had so much fun; my wife felt so fulfilled that she was beside herself ☺️. We have seen the fruit of our labor, and it is good; not to be regretted.
Hi Louis, It sounds like homeschooling was a real blessing for you and your family. We homeschooled our daughter as well (NOT through Gothard’s system). But the article is focused on exposing the way Gothard, the Duggars, the youth pastor etc. twist Scripture in ways that teach purity in FAR less than healthy and holistic ways. Can we justify Josh Duggar’s father and mother NOT reporting the fact that he sexually violated 5 girls? Can we justify the way Gothard systematically used and abused girls? Can we justify the way the youth pastor taught “True Love Waits” and then sexually violated one of the girls because they have to obey their father and their pastor, so they have no choice to have their own voices, or honor and respect their own bodies?
Christ said that it would be better for a large stone to be put around an abuser’s neck and throw him in the lake, than to hurt one of HIS little ones (Matt. 18). As a former pastor of 20-years, and a licensed Therapist, I know this pattern of manipulating Scripture, grooming and abusing children, and then covering it up – far too often.
Ephesians 5:10-11 tells us to expose evil doers and have nothing to do with them. Ephesians 5:21 talks about MUTAUL submission IN Christ. But instead, these wolves focus on Ephesians 5:22, 24, turning an intelligent faith into blind faith. And they will be held accountable by God, on judgment day, as He exposes their deepest thoughts and motives before the universe. (Heb. 4:12-13).
So “Disobedient Women” is honoring Ephesians 5:10-11, to protect our children from being groomed and violated by these men and religious systems that trust in human power – masquerading as God’s Word, to gain access to and control over their victims.
With all due respect Mr. Zaragoza would you please post the exact quote from this article that “seems to encourage promiscuity in young folks”?
Gracias.
“I think purity culture definitely plays a role. There is pressure for girls and boys both to avoid any sort of sexual contact, even front-to-front hugs, and to avoid kissing until marriage in the more extreme cases…” Blaming the purity culture on the abuse in evangelicalism is a mistake. The purity culture is a biblical response to the rampant immorality among young (and old) that existed in the 70s. It is much worse today, of course, with even many in the church winking at cohabitating
and premarital sex among engaged Christian couples.
There should always be “pressure for girls and boys to avoid any sort of sexual contact, even front-to-front hugs” The author seems to be saying that this “pressure” should not be applied, or is at fault for sexual misbehavior in the church. She hints that mores should be relaxed and even some experimentation might be allowed. That is the tone that I took from the piece.
Any parent worth their salt will teach their sons and daughter about love and sex and abstinence, and about trusting God to bring a “mate” into their lives.
Further, I think it is a great idea for young men and women to remain in the home, if possible, in the late teen years so they can observe the parent’s marriage at work.
I really wanted to say a little more but the word limit (300) kept me.
Our last two children hung around the house after graduation, and we didn’t discourage it because they were a delight to have around. But I really think they wanted to see how much I loved their mother and how we related to each other, and learn how to love their future spouses.
I remember when our youngest, a daughter, turned eighteen and started to date–we didn’t frown on dating, she just didn’t want to–she had the young man call me to ask me if he could date her. I thought that was priceless. I didn’t tell her at the time, but we knew that this proper young man was not the one God had for her. They dated a handful of times and then she stopped dating for two years until she met a Green Beret that swept her off her feet. They now have three children. She is a stay at home mom.
Seems to be an anti-bible author, who is influenced by non-believers after having a true wrong committed against her. There must be many Biblically correct Christians who are not into power issues that could counsel this sister from God’s Word. Women are not to be subjected to all men: just one man (their husband). Wives should be Chief Counsel, true friend, respected by all the family, never taken for granted. But in a family (as well as a company, university, city, state, nation, or on a boat) there is one person who makes (after counsel and prayer) the final decision when a decision is needed. The Bible gives that decision to the husband. (Author has been married to same wife for 50 years, lifetime student of Bible, Bible college grad. and prof. ordained pastor, computer service tech.).
And don’t forget the Apostle Paul implores the husband is to act sacrificially toward their wife, as Jesus Christ was for the Church. And church leaders are to be one-wife minded.
Rich,
Congratulations on your marriage of 50+ years.
But that fact does not give anyone more credibility to keep women in America from leading “a company, university, city, state, nation, or on a boat.”
Truth be told, many women are as qualified or even more qualified than the men who are candidates for those positions.
Your personal religious preferences should not keep women from leading in business, government or politics.
Women leading in business have no time for families. For example: selling real estate. My dad spend endless hours attempting to sell houses in So. Cal. in the mid-60s. We would barely see him. However, since my mother was a stay-at-home homemaker, my brothers and I were never alone. We went down to the beach three times a week (in the summer), had great food, clean clothes, and were also kept out of trouble. Today, while Mom climbs the corporate “ladder”, she AND dad never see their kids. So, whats the point of having kids: you don’t raise them…others do. And if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, it is important what morals you instill in you kiddos. If you are not a believer, you let others put their thoughts in their minds. Choose one or the other, but you cannot do BOTH well. (And these are biblical concepts, not my “personal religious preferences”.
Rich,
Your arguments are wrong on so many levels.
First of all your religious, patriarchal preference makes no room for women who choose not to marry, choose to not have children or are biologically unable to have children.
Secondly, it subjugates women in secular arenas to your religious preference even when those women do not practice your religion.
And lastly, if you want to rely on anecdotal evidence, I know many Christian women who successfully balance careers with “wifing” and mothering. One was my mom. She is college educated, with a masters degree and taught school for decades. After she retired she had a successful career in business. (By the way, she and my father have been married for 60+ years). Her example also helped pave a way for both my daughters to go to college, have careers and break the religious glass ceiling for other young women in the family.
Also, being married for over 50 years is extremely rare today. It DOES lend credibility to the concepts that we have followed, which are from THE authority, the Bible. BTW are you married? Have you applied your life “truths” to your marriage? How’s that doing for you? Following the prevailing non-biblical marriage advice today (many church goers would never listen to advise from the Bible) divorce is rampant in our society. I have family members who go to church, but have divorced, some more that once. They attend church, but the churches are where the Bible is not taken literally, and no wisdom from it is used. Sad but true. That Bible plainly states that men (generally) go outside the home to gather the practical means to support that family, while the wife nurtures the children and makes the house a “home”. One Christian sister has a book “Nestbuilders”. I highly suggest it.
Rich:
“That Bible plainly states that men (generally) go outside the home to gather the practical means to support that family, while the wife nurtures the children and makes the house a “home””
Rich can you tell me the scriptures that you are basing this statement on? Scriptures that speak to general principles in timeless terms. i. e, not speaking into the culture of the day
Others seem to have already sensed the snare here. The sin was real, the need to expose it real and the removal of the wolves a real need likewise. Its a narrow road that leads to life however and so the answer to bad doctrine isnt a response fixed thru with humanist views but rather a return to what the scripture actually says. Proper headship remains God’s order but men, this is a massive burden not a privilege to you you can then abuse. Its an accountability to God. A general lack of fear of God in the Churches has no small part to play in the whole mess.
The answer to the perversion of biblical truth, is NOT to jettison biblical truth. That seems to be the constant that’s admired in these articles. I expect someone to eventually come out and say “I was taught chastity and to honor godly leaders, but then I was abused by ungodly leaders. So now I’m free to participate in the things the rest of the world is doing!” If that’s not the implication, it’s pretty close to it.
Yeah, it seems many times we throw the baby out with the bath water. Let’s punish and ostracize the evil doer and at the same time let our moral anchor embed deeply in God’s Word and not swerve.
Thank you, Mr. Thorpe, for your sound response. The Bible gives no license to predators while also laying enormous responsibilities on both men and women of faith. It’s simple to understand but not easy to live.