Professor and Students Examine the Crisis of Church Abuse in New Course
Marie Griffith, a religion professor at Washington University in St. Louis, thought she’d probably get eight or nine students signed up for her course, “The Abuse Crisis in Modern Christianity.”
Given that the course was brand new, she was shocked when it filled up instantly, with a long wait list of students hoping to get in. Once the class began, the 30 students who enrolled engaged deeply with the material. “It just blew me away how passionate and committed they were,” Griffith says.
A historian of American Christianity, Griffith, (pictured above), is currently writing a book examining how a range of Christian denominations, both Catholic and Protestant, have addressed the problem of sexual abuse by religious leaders. She notes that while abuse cases in the Catholic Church have been widely discussed since the Boston Globe Spotlight articles in 2002, there is much less information about abuse in Protestant churches.
“There’s no paper trail,” she explains. “Protestant denominations, unlike the Catholic Church, all differ in how much documentation they require churches to keep. And a lot of these Protestant churches are just their own independent thing. So if they want to burn records or not keep personnel records or not deposit them in a library, they can do that.” Given the lack of records, much of Griffith’s research has involved interviewing victim-survivors in different churches about their experiences. She welcomes emails from survivors who are open to sharing their stories with her.
ONE OF THE FIRST COURSES ON CLERGY ABUSE
Griffith believes her class, which she offered for the first time in fall 2022, is among the first taught to undergraduates at a non-church-related university. Most students took it as an elective. Griffith created the course in part because students seemed so intrigued when she described her book project. Current college students are very familiar with the #MeToo movement, she notes, which dominated headlines while they were in high school. “They’re really passionate about issues around sexual violence and redress and consent,” she says.
In the course—the syllabus is available here—students read several powerful memoirs from victim-survivors of abuse as children and adults as well as loved ones of survivors. “I found that the memoirs were important for students to really understand that experience,” she says.
Griffith also invited guests who came in person or visited virtually to address the class. They included Terry McKiernan, founder of Bishop Accountability, an independent archive of information about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, and Mike Hoffman, a member of the Awake community who was sexually abused by a priest as a young altar boy. Hoffman remains a committed Catholic, which was fascinating to many of Griffith’s students, she says.
Other guests included an attorney who has prosecuted clergy abuse cases, David Clohessy, a survivor who for many years led the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), and Christa Brown, a survivor also active in SNAP, who has been a leading voice around clergy abuse in Southern Baptist and other evangelical contexts. The students also wrote papers after watching documentaries about abuse, including The Keepers.
COURSE GOALs
One of Griffith’s goals was to leave students with “a healthy skepticism of institutions,” she says. “They are made up of people, and many of us hold some institutions sacred.” In her interviews with people who have experienced abuse, Griffith noticed that many were raised to believe that institutions such as the Catholic Church are “so sacred that the people working in them couldn’t possibly do harm.” In both her own children and her students, Griffith says she has tried to encourage a “healthy distance” from such institutions.
“If their gut is feeling funny about a certain religious leader or something someone’s telling them to do, [I hope] they know to trust that and go to a trusted friend or authority figure in their lives,” she says.
Griffith also aimed to counter the belief that the problem of sexual abuse in churches has been solved. “It exists in all institutions we know, and some institutions handle it better than others,” she says. “I want them to have a really clear awareness of the coverups that have happened, frankly, across religious institutions and other organizations like the Boy Scouts.”
RESHAPING THE COURSE FOR FUTURE
Some of the students arrived in the class with religious beliefs, Griffith says; her group included students who were Catholic, evangelical Protestant, Jewish, and Mormon. But others were secular, with no religious background. Over the 12 weeks, Griffith grew to believe that this topic was problematic for secular students in particular. Because it was their first deep dive into religious topics, she worries that they were left with unbalanced views about faith. “These students were left wondering why anyone would want to be part of such corrupt institutions,” she explains. In the future, she may require students to take other religion courses first so that they have more complete information about religious experience.
Griffith also noted that class discussions often returned to the question of what should be done with abusive leaders, an area where she has little expertise. She hopes in future semesters to invite a professional who works with perpetrators of abuse to help student consider these questions.
The subject matter was tough; Griffith advised students to take care of themselves while learning about abuse, and invited them to leave the room if they needed a break—which she doesn’t do during other courses. Griffith also noted that she was often exhausted after teaching the 90-minute classes. “Just the reading could be exhausting,” she says.
Still, Griffith said that the students’ passion and engagement left her with hope about future efforts to grapple with church abuse. “I do think if there is greater attention in the universities and colleges,” she says, “and you’re catching college students at that really formative age, I would be hopeful about that.”
As she continues to work on her book, Griffith has been gathering information about what has helped survivors to heal and what gives them hope. “It can be such a grim topic,” she says, “that I want to end with the hope that I think all survivors need to hear, that all of us really need to hear in a broken world.”
—Erin O’Donnell, Editor, Awake Blog
