|
Stephanie Krehbiel on the Woody Allen Case and the Problem of John Howard Yoder: A Must-Read Article
By William D. Lindsey
A
must-read article from this past week: Stephanie Krehbiel on
the "Woody Allen Problem": how is it possible to read
pacifist Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder now, now
that we know that Yoder was a serial sex abuser? Here's the
problem:
Small wonder, then, that Mennonite church leaders wanted nothing less than to deal with the evidence, mounting throughout the 1980s and 90s, that Yoder was a serial sex abuser. Many of his victims were women students at what is now the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS), and at the University of Notre Dame, where he was also employed. Dozens of women lodged complaints with seminary officials and church leaders, who seemed by and large helpless or unwilling to control his predatory behavior. Yoder died in 1997 without any formal charges ever having been filed against him. The secrecy with which church leaders and administrators dealt with his behavior meant that many people who were influenced by his theology had no idea that women had accused him, repeatedly, of sexual violence. As Krehbiel goes on to
point out, it's not just that the Mennonite church did
nothing to deal with Yoder: "[W]hat they did do was too
little, too late, and more about institutional damage control
than about justice or healing for Yoder's victims."
And, of course, as Krehbiel also notes, the re-emergence of the
story that Woody Allen sexually molested his step-daughter Dylan
Farrow raises questions all over again about what we do with
Yoder's legacy--just as it is raising questions for many of
us about how to interpret Allen's work.
Krehbiel makes extremely
important points about the parallels between the two cases and
how each affects the legacy of the man in question: first,
"The reemergence of Yoder's case is a powerful reminder
of the consequences of ignoring or dismissing survivors."
As she notes, in both the Allen case and in Yoder's case,
women who have sought to come forward with stories of sexual
violence have been treated as "gossips" who do not
deserve a hearing because, well, gossip is gossip.
In a legal (or church)
system that seems inherently skewed in the direction of male
power, in which powerful men can avail themselves of this system
to protect themselves from "gossip" that they
characterize as unfounded and malicious, gossip has another
meaning: it becomes one of the only ways in which women
susceptible to abuse by those men can make known the danger that
the men pose, and can warn other women to avoid that danger.
Krehbiel makes another
point that I consider extremely valuable: she notes (and
she's absolutely correct about this) that "theology is
a male-dominated field with a long history of covering,
enabling, and trivializing sexualized violence." And the
brand of pacifism promoted by Yoder and many of his followers is
a particularly patriarchal kind of pacifism, one totally
impervious to the insights of feminist theologians. As she
points out,
As a powerful male leader operating in a patriarchal religious academia, Yoder was anything but atypical as a sexual predator. His pacifism makes for some interesting irony, but there's always been something oddly masculinist about the way Mennonites teach nonviolence. Mennonite pacifist discourse evolved as a response to the dominant ideal of warrior masculinity, a way for men to justify not going to war; it has never been as fully formed or as celebrated for its challenge to interpersonal violence. And so the quite serious
challenge with which any of us who ever read Yoder's work
with interest and approval (and I did so in the past) are
left:
The most celebrated twentieth-century voice for our long, much-maligned tradition of nonviolence was a violent sex offender. No scenario I can imagine could possibly make the limitations of patriarchal pacifism more obvious.
In the thread following my
last posting of an excerpt from John Corvino's What's
Wrong with Homosexuality?, I've kicked around some of these
questions with melissia. The position towards which I'm
working in my own thinking about these questions is as follows:
as Stephanie Krehbiel claims, theology has always been
and remains a patriarchal enterprise in which the viewpoints of
men are privileged over those of women, and in which the
viewpoints of heterosexual males establish what is normal for
all the rest of us.
Theology is, therefore,
by its very nature, a tainted enterprise--every bit as much as
is much of the philosophy of the centuries, the literature, the
art, the music. Tainted by patriarchal preconceptions that are
deeply misogynistic and, to a great extent, heterosexist and
homophobic . . . .
I can't bring myself
to see, however, that this taint ought to preclude my learning
from the work of philosophers, theologians, artists, historians,
etc., who display very clear misogynistic and/or heterosexist
bias in their work--particularly when they lived in cultures in
which there was no critique of or challenge to these biases, and
they simply mirrored what was taken for granted in the culture
around them.
This does not mean that I accept that bias as I
grapple with the work of these writers. It doesn't mean that
I excuse it. It certainly does not mean that I combat anyone who
seeks to bring this bias to the fore in critical commentary and
challenge it--and who points out that how we assess the work of
a writer from the past should have a great deal to do with how
he (or she) handled the taken-for-granted biases of his/her
culture.
I do, however, see a distinction between how this kind of
critical enterprise functions as it addresses writers who lived
in a cultural milieu in which misogyny, heterosexism, or all
kinds of other -isms we now deplore were taken for granted, and
how the critical enterprise handles writers who live in a milieu
in which there are strong challenges to biases like misogyny and
heterosexism. Plato lived in a world in which it was taken for
granted that women--all women--had the standing of
slaves. They were there to serve men, to make homes for men, to
be men's sexual objects. And to be silent . . . .
John Howard Yoder lived
in an entirely different cultural milieu. He lived in a culture
in which it is increasingly taken for granted that women have
every bit as much right as men do to stand at the center of the
stage of history, and to be autonomous actors on that
stage.
Yoder had every reason in the world to know that women are
not objects, and that sexual predation targeting women as
objects of male violence is utterly unacceptable. To my way of
thinking, this--the fact that Yoder pursued his work in a
culture that increasingly makes sexual violence against women
unacceptable (though that violence remains omnipresent and may
even be increasing in many societies around the world today, and
is tacitly approved of by many of the powerful institutions in
all societies)--means that I cannot appropriate his work in any
way at all except by recognizing that it's tainted at
the outset by completely unacceptable presuppositions about
these matters.
(The same holds true for
Woody Allen, though, as I've said in previous postings, I
continue to try to avoid judging him guilty without a fair
hearing, even as I listen carefully to Dylan Farrow, because I
have come to have a kind of preferential option for those who
claim to have suffered childhood sexual abuse as it becomes
increasingly apparent to me that abuse survivors have not
received a careful and sympathetic hearing until very recently.)
One final note: Stephanie Krehbiel's essay recommends Ruth
Krall's book on the Mennonite church and the Yoder case, The
Elephants in God's Living Room. I've just begun reading
the latest volume in the book, which is available at Ruth's
website (the preceding link points to it). It's
exceptionally powerful, and I strongly second Krehbiel's
recommendation of the book.
The photo of Stephanie Krehbiel is from
the website of the Department of American Studies at
University of Kansas, where she's a Ph.D. student.
|
.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.