Plain Community Sexual Abuse Victims Sometimes Pressured to Take Offenders Back

By Shelly Bradbury, Peter Smith, and Stephanie Strasburg
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
May 28, 2019

https://newsinteractive.post-gazette.com/coverings/mennonites-forgiveness-sexual-abuse-coverings-plain-amish-lancaster-county/

Church leaders pulled Kay aside one Sunday and told her she was excommunicated for failing to forgive her husband.

Her conservative Mennonite church demanded that she take a registered sex offender back into her home, that she forgive and forget what he had done to their 1-month-old baby and her sibling who followed.

But Kay had tried that blind forgiveness before, and she couldn’t do it again.

She’d gone to counseling with him, brought the kids to him for supervised visits, eaten meals with him. But this time, he needed to prove to her that he was trustworthy, and in the year since he’d been off probation, he’d ignored her rules and pushed the boundaries and pointed fingers at her for breaking up the marriage.

Let's go back to 1994, to the devastation I felt when I walked in on my husband abusing my baby girl. My tiny, helpless 1-month-old baby. He apologized and promised it would never happen again, and I believed him. | Kay, a former conservative Mennonite woman, shown here along a road in Central Pennsylvania.

And so she didn’t welcome him back, despite pressure from the church and his family.

And then, on that fall day in 2007, she was kicked out of the only community she’d ever known, suddenly facing a future as a single mother of four because she wouldn’t let an abuser raise her children. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is identifying Kay and her husband only by their middle names to protect the identity of their children, some of whom were victims of sexual abuse.

The Sunday after Kay was excommunicated, her husband was welcomed back into their Lancaster County church, Kay, now 47, said in a February interview. She was ostracized.

“Everyone just turned their backs on us,” she said.

Forgiveness is paramount in many Amish and Mennonite communities.

Those conservative Plain faiths take literally the words Jesus spoke in the Lord’s Prayer — “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” — and believe a person who fails to forgive will not receive forgiveness from God but rather eternal damnation.

Pastors in Plain communities expect church members to offer complete forgiveness to anyone who has wronged them — and once the matter has been dealt with in the church, true forgiveness means never speaking of the issue again, former members said.

To many, such complete forgiveness and restoration is a beautiful ideal. But some say the Plain faith’s forgive-and-forget philosophy makes it next to impossible to hold offenders accountable or warn others about their behavior — particularly people who have sexually abused children.

“In a setting like that,” Kay said, “if it’s confessed and forgiven, you are supposed to forget it.”

The radical forgiveness of the Plain faiths has made headlines for decades.

In 2006, a 32-year-old man burst into an Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Lancaster County, and shot 10 girls; five died. The attacker then killed himself as police closed in. That evening, Amish elders visited the man’s family to say they held no grudges. They went to the shooter’s funeral and offered condolences to his widow, making news worldwide.

The Plain faiths frequently cite examples of extreme forgiveness in the Bible, like Jesus and the martyr Stephen, who both forgave their killers. And while many Americans view forgiveness as the end of a long emotional healing process, many Amish and Mennonite churches view forgiveness as the start of that process. Forgiveness must be granted, and with forgiveness comes reconciliation and restoration.

“If we do not forgive, how can we expect to be forgiven?” a group of Amish wrote in response to inquiries about their response to Nickel Mines.

The Amish and Mennonite practice forgiveness in countless small ways every day, so forgiving major calamities is a natural extension of a well-tuned habit.

While Plain communities are often lauded for their radical forgiveness, there is a darker side to the deep-rooted belief, former church members said, in which it is used to silence anyone who continues to discuss another’s forgiven sin.

A forgiven sin is “a dead topic, it can absolutely never be mentioned again,” said Hope Anne Dueck, co-founder of A Better Way, an Ohio-based Christian organization that combats child sexual abuse. “If it is mentioned again — let's say [a wife] went to the church and said my husband needs long-term counseling, he needs long-term accountability — she would be told she's bitter, she’s unforgiving and she's the one who needs dealt with. Because he's said he was sorry, and this is not to be mentioned again.”

A man who confesses to church leadership that he sexually abused children might be required to go through a period of “probation” or “proving” in which he loses his full rights of church membership and receives additional supervision and mentoring. At the end of that time, the man often makes a general confession before the church, said Trudy Metzger, a former Mennonite and sexual abuse survivor.

“The apology will sound possibly something like, ‘[I] have struggled with immorality,’ so we're not calling it out for what it is,” Ms. Metzger said. In some churches, the nature of that immorality — child sexual abuse — is never discussed.

There’s often no system for separating that offender from children after he is forgiven, Ms. Metzger said.

“That wouldn't be reflective of a forgiving spirit; that would look like we don't believe that they've really repented, that they're actually forgiven,” she said. “Now, parents who are aware, some will be very proactive, and there will be the whispers, you know, in the crowd, and they will know — but in some cases, there's really no awareness.”

Today, some Plain leaders say they’re learning from their mistakes, learning that forgiveness can be coupled with ongoing accountability and protection for children. In Lancaster County, a committee of Old Order Mennonite and Amish elders works closely with law enforcement and child welfare officials on abuse cases.

One elder on the committee, who asked not to be named because of the Plain aversion to self-promotion, said during a March interview that he and other committee members visit church leaders to impart the importance of reporting abuse to law enforcement.

When a molester confesses his sin to the church and claims he can stop, “We know that is not the truth,” said the committeeman. “They need more than just a confession.”

Any such awareness that abuse needs to be reported to law enforcement came too late for many adult survivors, advocates say. If there’s progress, they say, it’s only because of the outside pressure they’ve brought.

Twice a year, many Plain churches hold communion services that essentially give church members a clean slate. The rite focuses heavily on forgiveness, and on a passage in which Jesus told the Apostle Peter that a repeat offender should be forgiven not seven times, but seventy times seven.

“We would say before communion, ‘I have peace with God, my fellow man, and I desire communion,’” Ms. Metzger recalled. “Once peace has been expressed, the issue may not be brought up again. So now we have made it so that twice a year, everything gets cancelled out in church. If you do [bring it up], you are not forgiving.”

When Kay refused to forgive more than a decade ago, the church welcomed her husband back and kicked her out for failing to forgive him.

“I was dumbfounded,” she said. “I was like, ‘Seriously?’”