How the Youth Minister Became a Sexual Predator

WTRF
June 17, 2014

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/how-the-youth-minister-became-a-sexual-predator/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-the-youth-minister-became-a-sexual-predator

[with video]

Last week, Leadership Journal, a publication of Christianity Today, published an anonymous essay by a former youth pastor. It started like this:

Seven years ago I was hired by my church to be the new youth minister. The youth group was on life support at the time, with only a few students involved. My wife and I, newly married, already had good relationships with the students and their parents and, with my college ministry experience, I seemed to be the perfect fit for the position.

The ministry grew steadily. Within a few years the group that once struggled to fill a minivan was taking over 40 students to camp every summer. Teens were involved in every area of our church. The students were participating in local, regional, and international missions, and were inviting their friends to our activities. The gospel was being taught, and students were accepting Christ, getting baptized, and serving.

Other youth ministers, wanting to experience the same growth in their groups, would ask me for tips on how to reach and connect with students. The growth of the youth group was so significant that our church was pursuing the purchase of a bus and considering plans to expand the facility and build a gym. We had outgrown our own building. I had no doubt that God had called me to the position and that he had even greater things in store for the ministry and for me.

But there was one problem. Because of that problem, I am now in prison and the youth group is back on life support. This is the story of how I went from being a successful youth minister to a convicted felon in three easy steps.

You can read the whole thing in PDF format here, but not on the Leadership Journal website. Instead, this is what you get there:

We should not have published this post, and we deeply regret the decision to do so.

The post, told from the perspective of a sex offender, withheld from readers until the very end a crucial piece of information: that the sexual misconduct being described involved a minor under the youth pastor’s care. Among other failings, this post used language that implied consent and mutuality when in fact there can be no question that in situations of such disproportionate power there is no such thing as consent or mutuality.

The post, intended to dissuade future perpetrators, dwelt at length on the losses this criminal sin caused the author, while displaying little or no empathic engagement with the far greater losses caused to the victim of the crime and the wider community around the author. The post adopted a tone that was not appropriate given its failure to document complete repentance and restoration.

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Any advertising revenues derived from hits to this post will be donated to Christian organizations that work with survivors of sexual abuse. We will be working to regain our readers’ trust and to give greater voice to victims of abuse.

We apologize unreservedly for the hurt we clearly have caused.

I think this is too bad. I’m glad they published the piece, and am only sorry that they didn’t do so with better framing at the beginning and the end, to anticipate the objections and deal with them.

The essay is valuable for at least two reasons. First, it shows how this youth minister allowed himself to fall into this grave sin, which is, of course, also a crime. The self-pity (“my wife isn’t paying enough attention to me”), the rationalizations, the secrecy, the all-consuming vanity (he loved being the center of attention in the youth group) — it’s all very human, and very real. If I were teaching a pastoral class at seminary, I would hand this essay out, along with strong warnings to my students to beware these danger signs.

Second, the essay itself shows how the prisoner, though he claims to be 100 percent to blame for his fate, still doesn’t appear to own up to the full consequences of what he did. The first clue is his description of the relationship as an “extramarital affair.” Which it was. But it was also statutory rape, because the female involved was a minor. This is what upset so many readers, and led to CT taking the entire essay down. I think that was an overreaction on the part of readers, and of CT.

The author did, at the end, concede that his partner was, in fact, a minor, and in an update, conceded further that she was a victim, and could not have legally consented to what happened. That wasn’t enough for the critics. I wish CT had left the piece up, but also published strong, reasonable criticism of it. If the piece fails to convey a proper sense of the author’s horror at the magnitude of his sin/crime, perhaps that is part of the lesson it teaches: that sex offenders are so narcissistic that they fail to see their victims as full persons. Or perhaps it was simply an editing oversight. It’s hard to know.

As someone who has written acres of posts over the years denouncing clerical sex abusers, I have to say that I think it’s a mistake to deny absolutely that the girl in this story had any role in her abuse. Read me carefully: I am not blaming her; she is not morally at fault, nor is she legally at fault. But if we are to understand what happened here for the sake of preventing our children from falling prey to creeps like this youth minister, we should at least consider that the girl’s flirting with him opened a door to a predator. Again, she bears neither moral nor legal blame for what happened. She was a victim of a sexual predator, full stop. I raise this issue for the sake of understanding the mechanics of how these things happen. According to the anonymous felon, things started slowly between them, but steadily escalated. They laid the groundwork for their relationship through texts — an important factor, because presumably that was a form of communication that allowed them to be emotionally intimate without being accountable to others.

One lesson I’ve taken away from this essay is to teach my kids not to relate to adults, male or female, in that way. They should not be in a regular texting relationship with grown-ups who are not their parents or guardians. Also, I learned from that essay to teach my kids warning signs that an adult authority figure in their lives is pushing to transgress important boundaries. It is entirely possible to learn these lessons from the essay while keeping it crystal clear that the unnamed girl in the essay bears no moral or legal guilt for her rape.

CT was bombarded with a campaign accusing it of “promoting rape culture,” and demanding that it remove the essay. Obviously its editors complied. I think that’s too bad, because the essay, for all its clear flaws, should have been the start of an important discussion of how these situations happen in churches. The anonymous rapist says in his essay that he was close to the girl’s family. The overwhelming majority of child sex abusers are either family members or friends of the family. No doubt the girl’s family’s trust of their daughter’s youth minister helped him get away with rape. This is not to blame the family, but it is important for families to be vigilant. In the Catholic cases, many times the clerical sex predators sought out victims from families that were happy to see the special interest a man of God took in their child. This is another lesson that could have been learned from the anonymous essay, but now will not be, because outrage drove it from the website.

Believe me, I know what it’s like to react with moral horror and disgust to these cases. I’ve done it many, many times, and in fact it’s what drove me out of the Catholic Church. I despise rationalization for the sexual abuse of minors, and have established a clear record on that front. That said, I believe that if we are to prevent sexual predators in the ministry (and elsewhere) from gaining the opportunity to abuse our children, and if we are to help our children protect themselves from exploitation, we have to understand how these people operate, and how the rest of us unwittingly enable them.

I think it’s also important to understand that sexual predators aren’t all the kind of greasy, snivelling weirdos of stereotype. Insofar as this anonymous youth minister can be believed, he never would have imagined that he was capable of such a thing, but a confluence of factors — his vanity, his self-pity, and sheer opportunity — led him down a dark path that destroyed lives. Nobody who is involved in ministry should imagine themselves immune. That essay indicates that the once-unthinkable became, over time, not only thinkable, but likely, and ultimately came to be. How did it happen? The essay gives one take on it, and it’s an important one, though certainly incomplete.

Again, I wish CT had initially published that essay along with five or six others, offering critical views, and expanding our understanding of this horrifying situation. It’s regrettable that an important conversation about the complex dynamics of clerical sexual abuse cannot be had now. To seek understanding of what happened for the sake of future prevention is not the same thing as trying to exonerate the rapist.

UPDATE: There are some interesting comments to this post, having to do with the relative culpability of the victim. The idea is that if she was 12, 13, or 14, the convicted sex offender bears far more of the responsibility in a moral sense (if not a legal sense). But if she was older when the affair began, she bears some responsibility for it, if not legally. I can see the point these commenters are making. I think it is very, very important to maintain the somewhat artificial distinction of the “age of consent.” There is nothing magical that happens when a minor turns 17 that makes them more capable of having sex than they were the day before. But the line has to be drawn somewhere, and I think we should maintain a powerful taboo in our culture, as well as legal barriers, against older adults having sexual relationships with minors.

That said, the comments make me think that exonerating an older teenage victim entirely might be dangerously counterproductive in preventing these kinds of assaults in the future. Here’s what I mean. If a 16-year-old believes that all the responsibility for preventing a sexual relationship from beginning belongs to the older person (male or female), the teenager may feel psychologically liberated to push beyond prudent boundaries, confident that the grown-up will stop things before they go too far. This would be a foolish move, of course, but I could see how it would happen. This does not and should not exonerate the adult from bearing the brunt of moral responsibility, and the entirety of legal responsibility. But if our goal is to teach our children how to behave to reduce the possibility that they will be sexually exploited by adults, then it seems to me that we have to teach our sexually mature teenagers that they have to exercise some responsibility and discretion. If my teenage daughter were to fall into the clutches of a predatory youth minister, I would stop at nothing to make sure he goes to jail for a long, long time, and I would stop at nothing to try to restore her. But I would rather not have to do any of that — meaning, I would rather the exploitative relationship not have taken place at all — and part of preventing that includes teaching her (and my sons) how to avoid placing themselves in a position to be emotionally compromised, and fall victim to the flattering romantic attentions of an adult. If we teach them that all the responsibility falls on the adult — as it must in a legal sense — we might leave them particularly vulnerable to trusting in an authority figure.