Why Are We In This Handbasket?

A Very Very Long Post about Dr. Andrew Bauman's book, Safe Church

Études prises dans le bas peuple ou les Cris de Paris - La Vie

First of all, super sad to hear about the death of Robert Duval. What a brilliant actor. Second of all, I had no intention whatsoever of disarranging my weekend to get through Andrew Bauman’s Safe Church: How to Guard against Sexism and Abuse in Christian Communities, published by Baker, but I did, because the Stand Firm guys think I should come on their podcast to talk about it. I’ve read so many of these books, by this point, I feel like I’m set for life, and yet here we are again.

Mark has a brief take down over on his Substack, and obviously Matt and I already talked about it yesterday, and we will again today, which might seem, to by-standers, like a severe over reaction. But I think, if you consider the ACNA and where it’s been, and how it was formed, you might understand why painstakingly dismantling something like this is so crucial. For, indeed, it is as good an example as any of what happens when you trade the Christian gospel for modern secular/pagan/beta-Marxist spirituality.

At the outset, I want to express, again, how I long for people within the church to try, just a little bit, to sound like Christians. I don’t think that Dr. Bauman is trying to be a bad person, but he has swallowed down a Temu gospel, a fake version of the real thing. Worse still, it is a version of Christianity that has been roundly debunked all over the place. There is no reason for people in the ACNA to get on this bandwagon that is so quickly reaching its past-by-date in the milk aisle (just to mix up a lot of various expressions).

The way you can know that it is a false gospel is that the Bible is chucked into the bin labeled “problematic,” and personal repentance for sin is lost in searching out misogyny and sexism in oneself and other people. It is a sort of strange mixture of Gnosticism with temporal prosperity victimology assumptions. It is the work of the “expert” who doesn’t posses the rich theological and biblical perspective that makes sense of the sufferings of this life, the relationship between men and women, and the travails aliens in a wilderness have to endure on their long journey to the heavenly City. Its focus is narrow and dusty—abuse, misogyny, sexism, a god who has muttered a heap of words that don’t mean anything.

Straight away, just as the book is getting off the ground, here is what Dr. Bauman says about abuse:

A good rule of thumb when determining if abuse is occurring is to first look at the power differential. Is there a power imbalance? Pastor and congregant, coach and player, boss and staff member, ​or even an older classmate or cousin who is looked up to—any of these positions have a place of power that can be exploited and used for personal pleasure. Forms of abuse include emotional, sexual, financial, and physical, but I would argue that spiritual abuse is one of the most confusing forms—and, within the church, one of the most prevalent.

This, we may observe, is broad and vague. We don’t know what we’re talking about, except that it can be anywhere done by people with “power.” Out of curiosity, I toddled over to the dictionary to see what the word ordinarily suggests. It’s various meanings—it is quite an expansive word, if the online dictionary is to be trusted—are ‘to insult,’ ‘to misuse,’ ‘to bully,’ ‘to attack,’ ‘to use wrongly.’ A nice synonym is ‘vituperation.’ Dr. Bauman offers short summaries of all the various ways a person can be abused, insisting, that “all these forms of abuse have the same foundation: an attempt to gain power and control over another person.”

I would like to respectfully disagree. There are a lot of reasons that people abuse other people. Power is only one of them. There is also jealousy, selfish ambition, hatred, pride, greed, thoughtlessness, and well-intentioned efforts to save or help. Ok, so, he goes through each kind of abuse:

Emotional abuse is nonphysical acts meant to assert power and control. Data collected in 2020 from the National Domestic Violence Hotline stated that 95 percent of their callers reported experiencing emotional abuse. This abuse includes such things as belittling words spoken to make someone feel dumb and small in an attempt to gain the upper hand over them.

Am I wrong to conclude, from this definition, that Dr. Bauman would like everyone in the world to claim to have been emotionally abused? Every person alive in the world has had to endure someone else saying nasty things to them, and has also been a person who says nasty things to other people. And yet we cannot all say that we have been emotionally abused. As a regular person, I have often endured the slights and insults of people who hate me, and some people who love me very much. I have also said things I shouldn’t to other people I love and to people I don’t love at all. This is what it means to be human. We use language in wrong ways. Only some of us have been emotionally abused. Indeed, the bar for something like emotional abuse, given the general condition of humanity, should be pretty high.

Sexual abuse includes more overt sexual acts such as r*pe but also any nonconsensual sexual contact, including a slap on the butt or intentional brush against the breast or upper thigh. This form of abuse asserts domination and power over another’s bodily autonomy.

Again, no. There is a substantial difference between “brushing against” someone else’s nether regions and r*ape. Can such attention and conduct be very annoying? Yes. Humiliating? Certainly. But sexual abuse is when one person overpowers another person sexually. In the case of a child, it may not be violent, but it will be malign and devilish, whatever it is. It is disrespectful, unconscionable really, for people who were merely made to feel uncomfortable to say that their “lived experience” is the same as someone who really endured unspeakable actions against themselves.

Financial abuse is a common way to have power over another person. By controlling the money, unhealthy churches exploit vulnerable people. Leaders might promise that people will get a “blessing” from God if they support the new building project, for example. Financial transparency and open communication about finances, both personally and institutionally, help safeguard against this type of abuse.

I have a friend who was controlled by her husband in the matter of her finances and I would absolutely count it as abusive. It was an action that came in a cluster of other sick and controlling behaviors. What happened to her is not the same as a pastor trying to get his parishioners to give money to a building project. Of course many church leaders are manipulative on the question of money, and they should repent because that is very wicked. But the definition of abuse needs to be more narrowly defined, so that the bad people will be caught and locked away.

What Dr. Bauman is doing here is actually making it so that wicked people will get away with their wickedness. Think how much easier it is, today, for the real racists to get away with their vile and ugly racism, since we’re all “racist” now. The same goes for abuse. When every little slight, every malfeasance, every single sin is labeled as “abuse,” then abusers get away with it, and the injured are never rescued and their wounds never bathed and healed.

Physical abuse is the most well-known form of abuse. Even the least abuse-informed communities can see bruises ​and know something is wrong. Physical abuse is deliberate injury to a body; punching, shoving, and slapping are the most common examples.

Yes, except when two people get into a fight with each other, and punch each other back and forth, they cannot then both claim abuse. I mean, honestly, a surgeon deliberately “injures” a body so that it can ultimately heal. Distinctions need to be made. Some people are actually physically abused, and they shouldn’t have to be lumped in with a couple of twelve year old boys who went at it on the playground.

Defining Spiritual Abuse Just like all the other forms of abuse, spiritual abuse is about seeking power and control over another person, but this type involves declaring that God is on the abuser’s side. After all, who can argue with God? Abuse advocate and author Sarah McDugal defines spiritual abuse as “the misuse of theology, scripture, church position, or spiritual influence to control, cause harm to, exploit, or reduce the personhood of another. At its core, spiritual abuse is any action that breaks the third commandment—where someone takes the name of God and then misrepresents his character using his name.”

I have never heard of Sarah McDugal. I will go look her up, I guess. But by her definition, I would count Dr. Bauman’s book as spiritually abusive because it misrepresents the character of God revealed in the Scriptures. Why is he trying to control, cause harm, and exploit the reader?

She notes this might include actions such as: twisting Scripture to avoid accountability using beliefs to gain an advantage leveraging spiritual leaders against another person silencing a person with Bible verses making someone believe they need you to teach them about God acting as the Holy Spirit on another’s behalf excusing any destructive pattern in the name of God engaging in other soul-destroying behaviors.

What are we supposed to do? Not quote the Bible? Not have people teach us what it means? The Bible is where we go to get the words of life that lead us to Jesus. So we’re going to have to quote it and study it. Of course, no one should twist the Scriptures, including Dr. Bauman.

Because spiritual abuse “affects not only our body and mind but our entire worldview and our picture of God,” McDugal explains, it can cause lasting damage. This abuse can be sly or blatant, subtle or fierce; there is no exact science as to what is or is not abuse, which makes it incredibly tricky when you experience it, especially from a trusted friend or spiritual guide. One of the most important items to remember ​when you encounter potential abuse is to trust your own body and what you feel. Scripture tells us that “your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God. . . . Therefore honor God with your bodies” (1 Cor. 6:19–20 NIV). God has given our bodies great wisdom, and learning to listen to our bodies is vital.

That’s not what that verse means. Dr. Bauman has just taken a whole verse out of context and twisted it. Should I therefore assume that he trying to get power over me, the reader? I am sorely tempted to make such an assumption. Again, notice how broad and yet nebulous this is. The problem is simply how another person makes you feel. So if you go to see your pastor because you have a raging pr*n addiction, and he quotes scripture and tells you to stop it, and you were hoping he would tell you it was actually fine, and you go away with the sadz, have you been abused?

Sometimes your body can be trusted, but other times your body is a big liar. My body tells me all the time to eat heaps of bread and butter, but I have to tell my body no. I have to beat my own body to make it my slave so that in all my members, I will glorify God. Does that make me the abuser? Again, spiritual abuse is really a thing, but not all people who feel bad when other people say things to them are abused.

This practice can help us to not be abused by those in spiritual authority, since spiritual abuse can be one of the most insidious forms of abuse. Do you feel unsafe in someone’s presence? There is a reason for that; your body is warning you, and you must listen. When your pastor or counselor made that comment, what did it evoke? Did you sense you were being manipulated or undergoing an attempt to be controlled? Author and theologian Scot McKnight has written extensively on spiritual abuse. He notes that it is “characterized by a systematic pattern of coercive and controlling behavior in a religious context,” and, like McDugal, he has found that it “can have a deeply damaging impact on those who experience it.”

Obviously, your instincts for self-protection are good and should not be ignored. There’s a reason most women don’t get into elevators with men to whom they haven’t been introduced and don’t already feel safe with. It is foolish to go out at night alone in places you don’t know anything about. You should exercise wisdom and reason and prudence. And you should also be really careful about the people you listen to, the books you read, and the content you consume. Because actually, a lot of it will make you feel really good about yourself, but is false, and therefore toxic. You risk cheerfully picking out a plump square of Turkish delight, and not noticing that the White Witch is about to cast you into her dungeon.

Some people are controlling, but they’re not going to tell you that up front. They’re probably going to so expand the definitions of words that you lose your intellectual footing, that you begin to distrust what you already know. Then they will come along and tell you that you’ve actually been abused. Then they will sell you a book for $25 or make you buy one of their webinars. Only later will they tell you that they don’t even believe in God anymore.

No, the best way to trust your own intuitions is to subject those intuitions to the light of Scripture, to work hard to have your aesthetic inclinations, desires, and thoughts shaped by the Bible. Gradually, as you become more and more formed into the image of Christ, will your own broken, tarnished imago dei be worth trusting.

Unfortunately, shaping your desires and intuitions according to the scriptures is not something that Dr. Bauman empowers the reader to do. Instead, he encourages rewriting bits to make it feel more comfortable:

My brilliant six-year-old daughter, Selah, beseeched my wife at bedtime, “I want to hear stories about girls who were heroes for God.” Most of the Bible stories were about boys. Even my theologian wife hesitated at her request. After much deliberation—and believing that the stories themselves and my daughter’s need to see herself represented were more important than strictly keeping to the character’s original gender—my wife began to change some of the names. Is doing so factually accurate? No, but we want to foster our daughter’s tender heart and imagination toward God.

Why did his daughter have a “need” to see herself represented? And how come that supposed need took precedence over respecting the integrity of the text? This sort of posture towards the Bible, which is replete throughout Dr. Bauman’s effort, betrays a distrust of God’s ability to communicate himself with words to the people he draws to himself. The Bible says about itself that it is “breathed out” by the Holy Spirit, that the human authors were “carried along” as they wrote. Is it lying, when it says that? Who will be the judge?

Dr. Bauman encourages readers of the Bible to pause and see how they feel when they encounter texts that might upset them:

Before we dive deeper into the Scriptures, let’s do a little emotional exercise. As you read the following two passages of Scripture, put ​one hand on your chest and the other on your belly, tracking what you feel in your body. Breathe deeply. One hint that a verse is being used for purposes it was never intended for is how we feel in our bodies when we read it.

Hoping the reader will have the heartrate elevated, and a feeling of nausea begin to creep in, he then quotes two passages women today have a difficult time with. The one where Paul tells the women to ask their husbands questions at home (I Corinthians 14:34-35) and the one where he tells Timothy the women are supposed to “keep silent” (I Timothy 2:11-12). Throughout he hysterically insists to the reader that the Bible does not include a sufficient number of named women, or women at all, and that their voices have been silenced, and that the text is the product of a patriarchal and misogynistic world.

As I was listening, I wondered very much if Dr. Bauman has any idea what the implications for this view of Scripture might turn out to be. If a person—whether a man or a woman, but lets just say a woman—comes to the text believing at the outset that it is inadequate for her spiritual and emotional needs, she will stand over all that it says and judge it. She will not open her heart and mind to the Great Healer who has the power to cut open, to reveal, to draw her to himself. She will not think that she has any sins to repent of. She will not meet the Lord Christ who died and rose again. She might very well die in her own sins, because she has never put her faith and trust in Jesus.

But for Dr. Bauman, it is the experiences of women who are central for understanding God, not God himself revealed in the text we have been given:

When we only study theologies created by men and fail to share the pulpit with women, we can never learn about the entirety of God.

That is quite an eye-popping claim. How would we be able to judge whether or not it is true, given that the Bible is not sufficient for our needs in these matters?

Dr. Bauman wants to have everything both ways. Even when women are invited in by men to do various kinds of work in the church, they ought to be allowed to do that work with complete autonomy:

We also need to be aware of the experiences of women like Samantha who encountered more subtle benevolent sexism, which is often more difficult to name as abusive. She described her experience working in church like this: I had more formal education than the job required, a decade of previous experience, a supportive spouse, and even a church that said they were “egalitarian,” yet at the end of the day, every single one of my decisions was analyzed, critiqued, and checked and rechecked by the lead male pastor before my ideas were ever allowed to be implemented in the ministry that I was leading. Am I really leading anything at all? This is what sexism feels like, even when it is subtle: “Why am I not trusted to do the job I was hired to do?” The feeling that a woman could not make a final decision without consulting a male ​leader was a common thread throughout many of the responses to the questionnaire.

Some people would find this level of scrutiny and engagement a blessing and the sign the people in charge thought the work was useful and worthy of support and even promotion. I would pay down a whole dollar (up from five cents in this inflated economy) that the men on staff at the church had to endure the same thing, because if its a church of any size, not only do they care about their theology, they also care about their branding, about the style of communication, about how church members perceive the staff. What people say in the church really matters, even if they are not the “lead pastor.” Viz, look back up at how Dr. Bauman defines spiritual abuse. There is probably not a pastor alive today is not very anxious about some person accusing him of abuse of every kind. You don’t get to have your cake and eat it too.

Dr. Bauman gets out of this pickle by declaring that all church circumstances that have men at the head—so most of them through all time and in all places—as a sign that the men are “insecure”:

When I consider the church’s reliance on a theology of headship, it strikes me as emotional in nature—not theological. I’ve noticed that many men, including myself, seem to struggle so much with insecurity that we must make others, particularly women, feel small so that we can feel less insecure. Instead of dealing with our core sense of shame and fear, we project it onto the women near us to avoid our own inner pain. This only keeps women subjugated and prevents men from growing.

How does Dr. Bauman know this? Is it possible that he is insecure and is projecting his feelings on to everyone else? I have always been in churches where the man was head of the church—either the rector, or the bishop—and some of those male leaders were insecure and bad, and some of them were quite good. And the fact that they were men did not make each of those institutions inherently misogynistic. On the contrary, the ones in which the leader was confident and took responsibility, things went very well. And the ones wherein he felt he had to pander to everyone’s whims and “need” for representation, things went badly.

This seems like a good moment to bring up the question of power. Very early on, Dr. Bauman makes this unsubstantiated assertion:

Shared power and mutuality are the goal. When power is shared, we all win.

In the church, “shared power” is not the goal. In the church, the goal is to glorify the Risen Christ. We are invited to do that together by Christ himself, who arranges us into something called his Body. We are not invited to “win” we are invited to worship. Some people have power, in the church, but their power is not the point. In fact, they subject themselves to Christ and subsist by his power alone—all of them together.

Power is such a complicated thing. If no one has any power, than the world devolves into chaos. So the people who have it should put themselves into the hands of Someone with Greater Power—that is God. Otherwise they will end up mistreating other people for their own ungodly ends.

In the world, the people at the bottom of the heap are generally stressed, ill, exhausted, and destined for an early grave. I’ve definitely seen scientific studies demonstrating this rather obvious aphorism. In the church, however, the people at the bottom of the heap are given special honor, have their nakedness clothed, their wounds healed, their sorrows comforted. And everyone can take a turn being at the bottom of the heap voluntarily, by embracing suffering and even obscurity for the sake of others.

There is something else that is wrong, though, in saying that “shared power” is the goal. Because when more than one person is in charge of something, then no one is really in charge. When two people decide to do something equally, then neither of them have to take reasonability and bear the heavy weight of authority. They can pass the hot potato of blame, back and forth, and also not do any of the tasks associated with their supposed power. Sharing power, in real terms, is a way for people who ought to go down with the ship, to actually get in a little boat and float away, leaving everyone else to die. That is why Jesus finally came, gathering into himself all the ruin and despair, accepting to bear the ruin, alienation, and blame of our broken estate. It is not for nothing that he is called the Head, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. And look what he endured, though he did not deserve it. He died instead of us, and then rose again, so that we could live at all.

It is really bad for women when men won’t take responsibility for the people in their lives. It is bad for a church to be run by a committee of power-sharers who listen to their own feelings to decide what to preach about or how much of the Bible can be trusted. It is toxic for women to have to live with men who enable their heretical views about God and themselves.

It’s bad for men, too. But a lot of women don’t have the means or the opportunity to get out of dangerous situations, to get away from malign forces that would devour and destroy them. Women need the help of men, just as men need the help of women. But that is probably better to leave for another time.

So anyway, have a nice day!