UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
About the celebrated Mennonite theologian (and serial sexual abuser of women* who were his students or had sought his pastoral counseling), Mennonite pastor and poet Hillary Kobernick thinks we’re asking the wrong question. As she notes, even after the history of Yoder’s predatory activities over many years is becoming clear, Kobernick continues to encounter people asking how we can use his work and honor him as an advocate for peace — sanitizing the story of the life from which this work proceeds, as it were.
Kobernick reports that she recently met a student who told her he was drawn to Anabaptist Mennonite Theological Seminary, where Yoder once taught, by Yoder’s legacy. The student asked Kobernick how we can continue to use Yoder’s work, then suggested his own answer to that question:
Yoder was brilliant. He’s such an articulate thinker and he lays such an important foundation for Mennonites. I think we can still redeem his work and use it to represent our church.
Kobernick’s powerful reply:
I asked him if he was, as he seemed to be, a straight white male with no history of sexual abuse. He said he was. Then I got angry, and with less grace than I wished I had. “That is not your question,” I said. “You do not get to decide how we use Yoder’s scholarship. You don’t get to answer anything. Your job, right now, is to sit down and listen to the women who were abused. Women who are in their 60’s and 70’s now who have spent 40 years keeping their mouths shut. They took the brunt of the pain. They suffered for us, among us, so we could maintain our rosy-eyed ignorance about the man himself. Why don’t you bring this question to them, and let them answer it in their own good time? It might take years, but it’s not your job to answer.”
As she concludes, what’s at stake in this discussion isn’t really the question of John Howard Yoder per se. What’s at stake is recognizing that an entire sorry system of men who control things, dispose of other human beings as human garbage, allocate power so that they themselves predictably have it and no one else does, stands behind a Yoder and his predatory behavior. That system is called patriarchy, and as Kobernick notes, it’s “about men in power who think they are untouchable and so they can touch whatever they want.”
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