WASHINGTON (DC)
Sojourners Magazine
August 8, 2019
By Angela Denker
Rachael Denhollander could have been a poster child for American conservative Christianity. Like many Red State Christians, she had been homeschooled and dressed conservatively. Her hair was long, dark, and straight, reminiscent of the encouragement in many conservative Christian communities for women to let their hair grow long and avoid cutting it. Thus Denhollander cut a sympathetic, or at least familiar, figure to Red State Christians watching the coverage of the Nassar case. True to her conservative Christian background, Denhollander said she forgave Nassar — and then asked the judge to give him the maximum sentence. To Nassar himself, she said at his sentencing hearing, “I pray you experience the soul-crushing weight of guilt so you may someday experience true repentance and true forgiveness from God, which you need far more than forgiveness from me—though I extend that to you as well.” She was the final person to speak, and as she did, a long-held dam was broken, and the mighty waters of justice came crashing through. For Denhollander, a trained lawyer and married mother of three who considers herself a conservative Christian, her outspokenness was costly. In her statement, she noted that speaking for sexual assault victims had “cost me my church and our closest friends.”
She told Christianity Today in January 2018 that Christians tend to “gloss over the devastation of any kind of suffering but especially sexual assault, with Christian platitudes like God works for all things together for good or God is sovereign. Those are very good and glorious biblical truths, but when they are misapplied in a way to dampen the horror of evil, they ultimately dampen the goodness of God. Goodness and darkness exist as opposites. If we pretend that the darkness isn’t dark, it dampens the beauty of the light.” Denhollander had shined a light into the sickly heart of American evangelicalism and its own cover-up of sexual abuse and oppression of women. As she told Christianity Today, “Church is one of the least safe places to acknowledge abuse because the way it is counseled is, more often than not, damaging to the victim; there are very, very few who have ever found true help in the church.”
Denhollander went on to say that the reason she’d lost her church was her advocacy for other victims of sexual assault within the evangelical community. She was referring to the Sovereign Grace Ministries scandal. In 2012, Sovereign Grace Ministries president C. J. Mahaney and the ministry itself were accused of covering up sexual abuse within the church network. The suit was dismissed in 2014, though a former youth leader in the network was convicted of sexually abusing three boys in a separate case. Denhollander drew an analogy between the scandal at Sovereign Grace and the scandal of the abuse she had suffered:
The ultimate reality that I live with is that if my abuser had been [Sovereign Grace youth group leader] Nathaniel Morales instead of Larry Nassar, if my enabler had been [a Sovereign Grace pastor] instead of [a gymnastics coach], if the organization I was speaking out against was Sovereign Grace under the leadership of [Mahaney] instead of [Michigan State], I would not only not have evangelical support, I would be actively vilified and lied about by every single evangelical leader out there. The only reason I am able to have the support of these leaders now is because I am speaking out against an organization not within their community. Had I been so unfortunate so as to have been victimized by someone in their community, someone in the Sovereign Grace network, I would not only not have their support, I would be massively shunned. That’s the reality.
Denhollander’s words were all the more prophetic within the pages of America’s most prominent magazine for conservative evangelicals. For decades, women had been sublimated and objectified and silenced within American churches. But their liberation would never come from secular feminists. It would come from within the church itself, during the presidency of a man who bragged about grabbing women by the pussy. But the rise of women in evangelical churches would not come easy. And many leaders would fall in its wake.
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