BishopAccountability.org

Generations of Pain

By Shelly Bradbury, Peter Smith, And Stephanie Strasburg
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
May 22, 2019

https://newsinteractive.post-gazette.com/coverings/mennonites-burkholders-sexual-abuse-amish-coverings/

[with audio]

[with video]

Part 2 in a 6-part series

The Old Order Mennonite bishop leveled a finger at the unwed, pregnant teenager who stood before him and jabbed it toward her.

“You,” she remembered him saying, “can’t be a church member until after the baby is born.”

Diane Snyder stood silently beside her boyfriend as the bishop made his declaration. She did not protest when her boyfriend escaped the punishment she was to suffer for the baby growing inside her.

And she stayed silent during the ensuing months, keeping to herself the gnawing fear that she’d die before the baby was born — die and go to hell because she wasn’t a church member.

She married her boyfriend, Jim Burkholder, and for years she never protested when he demanded sex, even when she was pregnant with one child, nursing another. It was her duty to satisfy him, and she couldn’t say no. This was what married women had to do, she believed.

But nearly three decades and 13 children later, Diane and Jim Burkholder have had a revelation about their own sexuality, and subsequently about how the separatist Plain faiths handle sexuality among members.

“There is such a lack of knowledge there,” Diane said of the way sexuality is approached in some Amish and Mennonite communities, and the way it worked through much of her marriage. “My sexuality was raped by somebody else who didn't understand their sexuality, and that's how it's working. And then dads and moms come in on the scene and they don't know what to do about it because it happened to them, too. So it's a generational crisis.”

As the Post-Gazette is reporting this month, a growing network of survivors of abuse among the conservative Amish and Mennonite communities, or Plain People, are seeking to reform a culture where they say an ignorance about sexuality is putting its young people at greater risk. They say churches often have handled abuse cases internally without reporting perpetrators to the law, although church leaders say they have improved practices and now cooperate with authorities.

About three years ago, Jim and Diane resolved to break the generational cycle they perceived.

But they faced significant push-back in their horse-and-buggy church community, and eventually concluded they couldn’t create change from within the church. They left, forging a new life and becoming outspoken critics of the way Plain churches handle sexual abuse — even as they discovered recent abuse within their own family and wrestled with the consequences.

“God has laid on both of our hearts to become vocal, and be sympathetic to both victims and perpetrators, to have empathy for both of them,” Jim said. “Not pity, but empathy. ... Because for me, I was a victim. I'm also a perpetrator. I also violated my wife in many, in many ways.”

One day during Diane’s final year of school — eighth grade — a friend pointed to a teenage boy chopping wood on an adjacent property.

“And my friend at school says, ‘Hey, that's Jimmy Burkholder, and he's a good friend of my brother, you need to get to know him,’” Diane recalled. She was 15, he was 16, almost 17.

The pair began an intense relationship, sneaking out in the middle of the night to visit each other, and soon started having sex.

“I didn't have a voice; I felt like I didn't have a choice,” Diane said. In the conservative Mennonite household she grew up in, love was not expressed — no hugs, no words of affirmation. She felt further isolated by the death of her father when she was young, and found that she clung to the relationship with Jim, craving the physical and emotional connection he provided.

Jim and Diane Burkholder, a formerly horse-and-buggy married couple with 13 kids, were both abused as children and now recognize their relationship started with rape -- and continued to be rape for decades -- until they had a major breakthrough.

Before him, she’d had sexual contact with one of her male relatives and a neighbor boy, she said.

“I think they had kind of conspired together that they were going to try out and get to know what sex is,” she said. “And invited [another girl] and I to engage with them in that, and our search for love was so deep and so intense, I don’t think we ever thought to say no.”

Jim, too, was involved with sexual acts growing up, he said. Once, when he was between the ages of 9 and 13, was with a male relative. Other times, he participated in bestiality.

“I did not know what it looked like to have self control over my sexuality,” he said.

In his conservative Plain culture, sex and healthy sexual practices were never discussed, he said.

As a young boy, Jim used to look at the church’s directory, which listed the names of church members, and yearn for the time that he and his future wife’s names would be listed there, a long list of children underneath.

After he and Diane married, the list of names under theirs grew and grew.

“Eleven of the children conceived out of my own lust,” Jim said.

It was during Diane’s 11th pregnancy that everything began to change. She was depressed and sometimes suicidal, she said. She’d sit in church and wonder who Jim would marry after she was dead.

“What she didn’t know is that I was hurting as deeply,” Jim said. “We lived in our own house, divorced at heart, for 20 years, not knowing how to put this together. Had divorce been an option, we would have walked. But for her it was not, with the horse-and-buggy [culture], there was no way possible for her to get out, to get any help. That just doesn’t happen in that culture.”

Diane Burkholder shares how she came to decide she would start telling her children she loved them. "I met with a friend who had asked us, 'Do you ever tell your children you love them?' And I lied and said, 'I do.'"

And then one day, Diane spotted a book on an end table at a friend’s house. The volume had a dove on the cover, and in big letters said, “Counseling the Sexually Abused.”

Diane borrowed the book. She soaked it up.

“And for the first time, I went to Jim and I said I had been sexually violated as a child,” she said. “And so we began, for the first time in our life, we began to talk in an intimate way about what happened to us as children.”

After that, Diane went to a three-week counseling program and began to understand the trauma of child sexual abuse. Jim went to a men’s group in which the leader challenged the husbands to go home and pray for their wives every day for 30 days.

Beginning that night, they knelt beside their bed together, holding hands, and prayed. They never stopped, Jim said, even after the 30 days ended. They attended counseling. And then they realized their sexuality needed to change.

“One day he looks at me, and he says, ‘Why don't you just get honest with the fact that I raped you?’” Diane said. “And you know, I think something in my heart changed that day with respect and honor for him that I had never felt before.”

“That was part of the healing process, to allow for me to give her space to say ‘Hey, I did this to you. I take ownership of that,’” Jim said.

Diane found her voice.

“[He] began to tell me, ‘You need a voice and you need a choice in this,’” she said. “And you can say, ‘No.’ You know, ‘Honey, if you don't feel like having sex tonight, I can wait till tomorrow,’ or whatever. And it's beautiful to have that voice and that choice. And I'm not sure how many women in that circle actually have that voice and that choice, because of what religion has taught them is right.”

Jim Burkholder and his son, Jeremy, 6, snuggle on the couch on Sunday, April 21, 2019, at their home in East Earl.

As Jim and Diane began to reconcile in their marriage, Jim started asking broader questions about their Old Order Mennonite faith, first of his father, and then of elders in the church.

“I started to recognize that there is more lying on my shoulders than just following after what the church tells you to do,” he said. “My whole life I have looked up to a denomination to raise my children.”

Jim and Diane began to push back against some parts of the Plain culture, particularly at school. At one point, they met with the school board about their children being bullied. Diane remembers telling the board that they should teach students about their own sexuality.

One board member responded, a blush of red creeping up his neck, that it should be a private conversation between parents and their children, Diane said.

The more she and Jim learned, the more questions they had, and the more feathers they ruffled in the community, they said. The Burkholders wanted to change the church and change the culture from within, but they slowly realized they couldn’t do it.

They began to talk about leaving the Plain world.

One Sunday in February 2016, Jim was one of the lead singers in church. He was given a song to sing, a farewell song in German. The moment felt right.

“On the carriage, we’re going home, I turned to my wife and said, ‘For some reason, there is something very deeply settled, today is the last day we’re going back,’” he said.

That was the last time he ever drove a buggy.

 




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