Silence Is Not Spiritual: the Evangelical #metoo Movement
By Eliza Griswold
On Wednesday, as ten thousand members of the Southern Baptist Convention gathered outside the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, in downtown Dallas, for the denomination’s annual conference, about two dozen women stood on faded grass nearby. They carried white banners with black-and-blue-lettered slogans, such as, “Calling Women to Preach Since the First Easter Morning,” and “I Can Call It Evil Because I Know What Goodness Is.” They were there to represent a protest movement, which includes such groups as #SilenceIsNotSpiritual and #ChurchToo, and has the potential to transform evangelicalism, by pressing churches to condemn domestic abuse, training pastors in caring for victims, and allowing women to assume positions of leadership. “God values women,” Ashley Easter, a protest organizer, told me Among the demonstrators was Autumn Miles, a thirty-seven-year-old evangelical leader and domestic-abuse survivor. Miles, who has a cascade of tousled hair that she describes as “fluorescent blond,” grew up as the daughter of a Southern Baptist pastor, in Terre Haute, Indiana. She married her high-school boyfriend when she was eighteen; after six years of physical and psychological abuse, she filed for divorce. Miles said that a panel of seven male elders at her family’s church called her in to explain her decision, instructing her father not to attend. “I know it might sound weird, but I could feel the presence of evil,” Miles said. They asked her to return to her abuser. She refused and left the church. When her father defended her, he was fired. Since then, Miles has told her story to many evangelical congregations, while speaking about the need to reform teachings on sexual and domestic abuse. “There’s a small group within the church that looks at a woman and says, ‘You need to submit,’ ” she said, quoting Ephesians 5:22: “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands, as you do to the Lord.” The passage is at the center of evangelical debates about the role of women. Miles’s ex-husband cited it in defense of his abuse. When the #ChurchToo movement started, last November, with abuse survivors telling stories of being silenced by church leaders, many said that they had been told to “submit.” In April, the movement erupted in the Southern Baptist church, when eighteen-year-old recordings emerged of Paige Patterson, the president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, counselling an abuse victim. Patterson told her to submit to her husband, and to pray for him at night. “Get ready, because he might get a little more violent,” he said. (Patterson claimed that his comments have been misrepresented.) In May, following reports that Patterson had mishandled two rape cases, more than a thousand women in the Southern Baptist Convention signed a petition calling for his resignation. He was fired, and this week’s conference became, in part, a referendum on how the church handles domestic abuse. In an open letter to the men of the Southern Baptist Convention, an evangelical leader named Beth Moore wrote, “Scripture was not the reason for the colossal disregard and disrespect of women among many of these men. It was only the excuse. Sin was the reason. Ungodliness.” On stage in Dallas, the Southern Baptists reflected on the crisis over #MeToo and the role of women roiling the church. “We saw the rejection of fundamentalism and an eagerness to engage in contemporary culture, rather than to turn away from it,” Jonathan Merritt, a reporter for the Religion News Service, told me. Merritt, the son of a former Southern Baptist Convention president, James Merritt, has attended the conference for twenty-five years. This year, he saw his father welcome the idea of a woman becoming president of the Convention—a position that would have been unthinkable until now. James Merritt also participated in a #MeToo panel, with three women and one other man, where he said, “The safest place an abused woman should feel she can go is her church. And the safest person she should feel like she can go to is her pastor.” Then a sexual-abuse survivor, Trillia Newbell, spoke about being “fondled” on a trip with her school band. At another session, Vice-President Mike Pence addressed the Convention, saying, “With Donald Trump in the White House, we will make America safe again.” The newly elected president of the Southern Baptists, J. D. Greear, later tweeted what many understood to be criticism of Pence’s remarks: “I know that sent a terribly mixed signal. We are grateful for civil leaders who want to speak at our Convention—but make no mistake about it. Our identity is the gospel.” Jonathan Merritt said, “The old guard and the new guard went head to head, and the old guard was obliterated.”
When Autumn Miles heard James Merritt’s comments, she said, “I want to hug him. I want to sit down with him and thank him on behalf of women who’ve been abused.” She went on, “Churches can be the haven, and I want to see that they are, truly.” In 2017, Miles, working with Lifeway Research, a Christianity-focussed public-opinion firm, commissioned a study of domestic abuse in the church, which surveyed a thousand pastors. It found that, while ninety-seven per cent said that their churches were safe havens for abuse victims, only fifty-two per cent had a plan for responding to abuse. “By definition, our churches are not a safe place,” Miles told me. So Miles hosts a radio show and records Facebook videos, often from a porch swing at her house in Dallas, that take on taboo subjects, such as incest and marital problems. The videos receive millions of views. “Whatever God tells me to say, I say,” she told me. Two weeks ago, I met Miles in New York, at Katz’s Deli, on the Lower East Side. Bleary-eyed from arriving at 3:30 a.m., following lengthy flight delays, Miles nursed a cup of coffee. She was having breakfast with another domestic-abuse survivor, who arrived looking slightly nervous. “I’ve never told my whole story before,” she said, sitting across from Miles with a plateful of sausage and fried eggs, “only bits of it.” To encourage her, Miles shared her own story. She was eleven when she first offered her life to Jesus, and started spreading the Word among her classmates. “All the people in my middle school were getting saved,” she said. At thirteen, she began wearing a gold purity ring, signifying that she wouldn’t have sex before marriage. Then, in high school, she started having sex with her boyfriend. She told no one, and she believes that the secrecy, and the shame she felt, helped him to establish control over her. They got married, and, during the first six months of their marriage, Miles was terrified that God wanted her dead and that her husband was going to kill her. She found herself unable to pray and contemplating suicide. One night in 2001, as she lay awake in bed, she heard a voice within her saying, “Do you remember me?” The voice drew her out of bed and across the hall, until she was standing before a blue Bible, which she was afraid to open. “I thought lightning bolts would shoot out,” she told me. She offered what she called a rebellious prayer. “God, I don’t believe in you,” she began, asking for an absolute sign that God was real. She opened the Bible and her eye caught a verse that said, “the righteous shall have long life.” She fell on the floor, apologizing to God for her faithlessness. This firsthand experience with Jesus, she believes, helped her to file for divorce. “The Bible says, ‘I am close to the brokenhearted and bind up their wounds,’ ” she said. “It doesn’t say ‘go back and be wounded.’ ” Miles strongly supports the #ChurchToo movement, but she doesn’t always agree with its leaders. Many are “ex-vangelicals,” who have left the church and believe that it is fundamentally wounding to young people. “The idea that there’s only one right way to be sexual has done so much harm,” Allison Ahearn, a co-founder of #ChurchToo, told me. To Ahearn, the tolerance of sexual and domestic abuse is part of a larger pattern of dysfunction among white evangelicals, eighty-one per cent of whom support Donald Trump. “Nationalism, tribalism, Donald Trump, it’s all spokes on a wheel,” she said. “Some people want to tinker with one little spoke. I want to smash the wheel.” Miles is more of a tinkerer. She’s not looking to destroy the church; she wants to reform it. To this day, she believes that having sex before marriage was a betrayal of her faith. “When my daughter turns thirteen, we’ll sit her down and talk to her about purity,” she told me. And, while some evangelical churches already ordain women, Miles occupies a middle ground. As she sees it, husbands and wives can work as co-pastors, as modelled by Aquila and Priscilla, two early Christians in Ancient Rome. “Not everyone believes this,” she said, getting out her Bible and flipping to Timothy 3:1-16, which defines who can lead the church. “If any man aspires to office of overseer it is a fine work he desires to do,” it begins. Ed Stetzer, a professor at Wheaton College and the head of the Billy Graham Center, believes that Miles’s theological conservatism makes her a more powerful force for reform. “The reality is that there is an evangelical subculture,” he told me, “and it’s probably more effective to speak within it than to shout from the outside.” She also remains loyal to prominent evangelical figures, including Jerry Falwell, Sr., whom she credits with helping rescue her after her divorce. It was Falwell, a family friend, who told her father that Autumn should go to the university he’d founded to find a new husband. “Come down to Liberty,” he said, “we’ll find her a good man.” Falwell, who was instrumental to the rise of the religious right, was virulently anti-gay, but Miles revered him. “He could be divisive, but his heart was for people who were hurting,” she said. One evening, while she was in New York, Miles invited three of her Facebook followers to a meet her at a midtown Shake Shack. At the Hilton Garden Inn, she traded her stilettos for a pair of pink high-top sneakers and strode over. I’d thought it might be difficult to pick them out in the crowd, but I hadn’t counted on the fact that Miles, with her long crimson nails and fuschia lipstick, is impossible to miss. When she pulled open the glass door, three millennial women beamed back at her. We staked out a greasy wooden table, and after a short discussion of eyelash extensions the talk turned to relationships. One woman feared that her husband, who’d lost his job at Microsoft, was losing his way as a Christian. She worried that he might not be attracted to her and felt constantly insecure about her looks. “You’re drop-dead gorgeous!” Miles said. “I’m not telling you that to blow rainbows up your butt. What do you think God thinks when you look at yourself and say, ‘God, You should’ve done better?’ ” Miles removed the bun from her bacon cheeseburger and wrapped it in lettuce, as another of the women shared her story. Raised Jewish, she had escaped an abusive marriage in the Modern Orthodox community when, at twenty-nine, she converted to Christianity. “I walked into the church, and something clicked,” she said. But, recently, a Christian boyfriend had abandoned her, and his rejection had been a source of shame in her church. The church elders wanted her to stop teaching Sunday school for a while, which upset her. “Sometimes the rejection of man is the biggest gift,” Miles told her. “Church people are the meanest.” Believing in God required the puncturing of ego. “God said, ‘Die to self, pick up the cross, and follow me,’ ” Miles said. “Did he say eat a cheeseburger, have a couple kids, and get rich then follow me? No.” The women laughed. Miles pulled a copy of her recent book, “I Am Rahab,” about the Biblical prostitute, who, in the Book of Joshua, helps God to destroy the sinful city of Jericho. Miles identified with Rahab, and she hoped other women would, too. “You need to pull the walls of Jericho down from the inside,” she told them. That meant standing up for what was right within the church, and destroying old ways of thinking, based in fear and self. “I think you’ve still got some Jericho in you,” she said. Then, at the table, the women joined hands, and Miles prayed that they choose “Mr. Right over Mr. Right in Front of Me.” A pair of German tourists glanced at the cluster of bowed heads. Two nights later, Miles attended worship at Graffiti, a Southern Baptist church in a former synagogue on the Lower East Side. The pastor, Taylor Field, a sixty-three-year-old with a graying ponytail and black cargo pants, could have passed for a burnt-out drummer. In fact, he came to New York from Oklahoma, thirty-two years ago, as a church planter, and initially preached in a storefront. He moved Graffiti into the synagogue building about a decade ago. Greeting Miles with a faded drawl, Field pulled a framed photograph off the wall to show her the drug dens that once lined this street. “It’s gone from a house of crack to a house of worship,” he said. Evening service was an intimate affair. The church’s five young and eager staff members outnumbered congregants, and the service consisted mostly of singing, with Field offering a short sermon on the value of difference. “It’s a big, big kingdom,” he said. “Aren’t you glad we’re all different?” Afterward, Miles went to Field’s office, to speak to him about how he handled domestic abuse in his church. Over the years, he said, he’d been called to intervene in a host of difficult situations, some he wasn’t sure he’d handled very well. Once, he’d been punched while trying to stand between a victim and her abuser; another time, a man had pulled a gun on him. “I tried to be a savior and it was more than I could handle,” he said. He was polite, but made hesitant by the presence of a reporter. “I’m just a local pastor,” he said, stressing that he wasn’t qualified to talk about politics or reform within the S.B.C. Still, he, like Miles, found the “ferment” of the moment exciting, because it was an opportunity to reckon with the question “What does the Word of God actually say? All reading of scripture involves interpretation, and this question is as old as the faith itself. “It’s always going on,” he added. Like many other evangelical leaders, he believed that change needed to come from within. “We’re all tribal,” he told Miles. As their meeting ended, he invited her to pray. “I pray this wakes up the pastors who need to wake up,” she said.
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