UNITED STATES
Hopefully Known
Tamara Rice
Can I be honest with you? I’m angry today. I’m sick to death of people equating exposing sin in the Church with slandering Christ’s bride. I’m sick to death of people equating exposing sin in the Church with hindering the gospel. I’m sick to death of people equating exposing sin in the Church with tarnishing our “witness” in the world.
I hate to go all cliche on you, but the people who say these things, frankly, don’t get it. They don’t get it. They are so awash in their ignorance of how the world really works, what the Church is called to be, and what unbelievers really think about and talk about that they actually think that silencing victims of abuse, protecting abusers, and refusing to publicly acknowledge harm done by institutional decisions is exalting Christ’s proverbial bride.
Right? Because if calling out criminal abuse and criminal church activities (i.e., not reporting abuse, which is a crime in many states, especially for clergy) is slandering Christ’s bride, then—at least for those who rail against us would-be temple cleansers—the opposite must be true.
Hiding/covering up pedophilia and abuse = building up the Church
Hiding/covering up pedophilia and abuse = advancing the gospel
Hiding/covering up pedophilia and abuse = increasing the effectiveness of our witness in the world
Now, no sane person of faith is going to look at the above statements and argue with me that they are true. And yet … every time they defend people who have covered up abuse, every time they accuse victim advocates of “slandering the bride,” every time they silence another voice or insist that their public sin is a private matter, they are proclaiming with their lives and their deeds that they DO believe the utterly asinine statements above. And if living out those toxic beliefs doesn’t actually in fact lead to slandering the bride, hindering the gospel and tarnishing the church’s witness, then I don’t know what does. And that’s the irony. These people simply do not get it. They do not get that they are the ones in sin. They do not get that they are the problem. They do not get that they shame us all. They do not see it. They do not want to see it. They are burying their heads and plugging their ears and still proclaiming in the face of all evidence to the contrary that the world is flat. They might be able to recite the Romans Road and the Four Spiritual Laws, but I doubt they’d know the transforming power of the gospel if it were staring them in the face.
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