UNITED STATES
Mennonite World Review
By Barbra Graber
I remember the Sunday morning two Mennonite Youth Fellowship friends who were dating were made to get up in front of the congregation to confess their sins. They were pregnant out of wedlock.
Meanwhile, John Howard Yoder, the most acclaimed Mennonite peace theologian, sexually assaulted and harassed untold numbers of women over decades and never publicly confessed.
Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, and other Mennonite agencies that hired Yoder, were unable or unwilling to publicly censure him. Years of institutional silence ensued while files of complaint letters accumulated. In 1984, AMBS announced that Yoder had resigned to teach at Notre Dame. No warning of his sexually deviant behavior was issued, and students were left to wonder why their brilliant professor suddenly flew the coop. Since that time, the church at large has not explained or acknowledged the decades of apparent complicity by its agents and institutions. Quite the opposite.
After public exposure of his abuses in 1992, followed by a secretive disciplinary process, Yoder was declared reconciled with the church and encouraged to return to teaching and writing. The promise of a public statement of apology to the victims whose lives he upended, and the wider ecumenical community whose trust he betrayed, never materialized. Today Yoder continues to be lauded, his books roll off the presses, and there’s pressure from all sides to go back to business as usual.
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