Crisis language

Andrew Schmutzer is professor of Bible at Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute where he’s taught for 24 years. He has also been an adjunct professor at Wheaton College and Northern Theological Seminary. Many of Schmutzer’s writings focus on abuse, including a book he co-authored, Naming Our Abuse: God’s Pathways to Healing for Male Sexual Abuse Survivors, a work reviewers called “stunningly vulnerable.” Here’s an edited version of the interview I conducted last year for WORLD’s podcast serial “Truth Be Told.”

You often speak of having a right theology of suffering. You’ve also said sexual abuse survivors suffer from “internal terrorism.” How do they relate? Sexual abuse is a very complex form of evil that touches on the body, on the psyche, on the emotions. It’s comprehensively damaging, and there is no simple cure for this sort of trauma. We need to take all kinds of measures to help victims. That’s part of what I’ve dedicated my life to.

Abuse is a complex form of evil, but sadly it’s common. From Genesis on all the way through Scripture, you have a kind of sexual preying on people. You could say it’s one of the oldest evils we have within the Christian story. They even took our Lord’s clothes from Him. He who clothed Adam and Eve was stripped of His clothes.

How does theology affect response to sexual abuse? There are dynamics at play in society, where it’s all about self announcement and “you get yours.” That’s an entirely different worldview than what the church is pursuing. Society is generally better at running this down, heading it into court, finding justice that way. But the church has historically been very slow to address sexual abuse and to find justice for people deep in the tissues of its organization, because they’re not given the right to talk that way.

How has the church historically talked instead? We jump on forgiveness very quickly, because it’s a Biblical construct. Is that what victims need immediately? Well, no, they need triage, but I’m not just taking potshots at the church. It’s also easy to take potshots at society, because their sense of empowerment never finds closure. They’re all about protest but not healing.

How would you change the conversation? Too often we’re not seeking redemptive atonement through what Christ has done—working from the inside out in a person. Instead, we’re seeking social atonements. I want this restitution or I want this as a punitive measure. I want an ankle bracelet on this person. I want them on the registry.

But aren’t those actions important? These are necessary things, but because I take a perpetrator to court and I get $800,000 as a legal settlement, am I healed now? It has brought a degree of rectification. Now I can pay for therapy. But that is not deep-rooted healing. Instead, society is all about hanging onto the victim card. It’s a form of victim Olympics, what we could even call a type of social Munchausen syndrome in which groups of victims glom together to define their identity.

So the irony is the church, even with its history of mishandling cases of sexual abuse, knows the only real path toward healing? We don’t get an exemption card in this life. We go through the same things the unredeemed go through, but we have a hope that they don’t. When we apply the gospel, we understand that all of our justice doesn’t come now.

But some justice may come now. Absolutely, if you need to put a perp away, put them away. We’re not talking about whether or not we do that. What we’re saying is the gospel gives one not only an identity in the now, but it’s an identity that reaches into the future. That enables me to bring perspective to my suffering, perspective to my trauma.

A prosecutor told me abuse within the church is particularly heinous because the perpetrators represent God. Can some forms of abuse be more heinous than others? The Lord intended the church to be His face and His hands and His feet to the world. Whenever the minister is involved in the abuse or turns a blind eye to it, that is also the emblem of Christ for that child and for that community. How do you work through a passage like Romans 12—I urge you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice? They feel like they’ve already been sacrificed.

What does the damage look like long term? By and large, faith is crushed. The connecting ligaments to organized faith get so messy, especially if the abuse took place in a church setting, say it followed orthodox rituals like prayer and Bible reading. Those elements are now broken and slimed.

Are physical consequences long term, too? Survivors can have lifelong health struggles because trauma ramps up their cortisol, their fight-or-flight reaction system. When the body is revving up that high, ready for defense, that compromises the immune system. Often there are extensive GI issues. The heart may have suffered from being under that much strain for so long.

How do you combat this sort of evil? With safety. In the context of the church, you make sure everybody that works with children and young people has an appropriate level of training so they know what they’re looking for, so they understand the messages that people subtly might be giving children and young adults.

What kind of messages? For 90 percent of abuse survivors, the abuser is someone they know. This isn’t “stranger danger.” That was common when I was a kid. That mantra is baloney. Most perpetrators are people the victim knows, because that’s how they have access. This person has a dynamic Type A personality. This person tends to be a smooth talker. They gravitate to high-density places where they have access to multiple victims. Many times, particularly within religious scenarios, an ecosystem supports what they’re doing. And if anybody raises their hand and asks why this is happening, they’re smacked down very quickly.

But their sin will find them out. What happens then? Someone will have to admit what went down on their watch. They have to admit there were signs, there were signals, there were allegations, but it went so contrary to what they wanted to believe, they could not go there. It was one voice against what the collective believed. We had the same thing with Ravi Zacharias. When allegations came out, no one believed it. They dismissed it. Later on, they said, “Well, we just didn’t know what to do. We didn’t know how to hear it.” They didn’t have the definitions in their heart and mind to get their head around what was happening.

You estimate abuse survivors make up 20 percent of every congregation. But the church doesn’t know how to address their needs, particularly those churches and denominations where every other word is victory. They struggle to address this transgenerational, deeply scarring kind of evil, because they’re committed to a worldview of somewhere between Frank Peretti and Hillsong. It’s easier to write a check for trafficked girls in Bangkok than it is to address the abuse survivors sitting in your own church balcony.

How do you know they want to be addressed? The younger generation looks at the church and says our silence is bald hypocrisy. That’s how they view what their grandparents would have called decorum. We need to keep the dirt out. But the younger generation now says, “You know what, folks, we’ve got to call it like it is.” They’ve been cybersuckled in an era in which anything is addressed in social media, so they don’t understand why the church picks and chooses its battles.

What do you perceive is the real battle? I’m afraid a merry string of unremitting happy choruses does not have the patience for this kind of pain, this kind of evil, this kind of suffering. So although 20 percent of our congregations could be made up of abuse survivors, most of them aren’t there anymore. That grieves me. Churches must address this ancient evil, because if we don’t, it’s a toxin that will metastasize into greater and greater expressions, and simply rolling the carpet over is not going to make it go away.

Where does a church start? Is there a support group? They probably have Financial Peace University. They might have one for divorce care, one for grief. If they do have a support group for sexual abuse, they probably don’t have one for male survivors. That’s the group that keeps slipping through the cracks. Address broken sheep starting within your own ranks, even if you have to get together with area churches to share resources and speakers.

You brought up male survivors. Is their healing process different from what women experience? There’s a difference in how we let men and women hurt. The same holds true for hurting in the church. Are our pastors allowed to be abused? In other words, if it’s in their background, can they talk about it? These are conversations that need to be had, but we need to address this in redemptive ways, not ways that are simply grasping for more self announcement. We need to redeem this within the faith community.

What else would you like to see from churches? I want churches to give people the skills to cry out in lament, because Biblical lament is crisis language. It’s language for crisis occasions and life events.

Lament is a skill that must be developed? A spiritual discipline? As Christians, we understand what a lament psalm can do. A lament psalm is not a reset button for pain and suffering, but in lament, the child of the Heavenly King can cry out to His throne room about a legal, moral offense. He can present his case before a bench that this secular society does not understand or have hope with, because their hope, as Paul says, is only for this life.

What’s gained by learning to lament in this way? Believers can gain perspective by relinquishing the right to vengeance—not the right to justice—the right to vengeance. And we give that anger and that spirit of unforgiveness to God. “Vengeance is mine,” says the Lord. The gospel reaches into the next life as well, and that is where the ultimate healing comes. There is a taste of healing now, but we don’t get it all in this life, and Christians need to understand that.