BOSTON (MA)
Dallas Morning News [Dallas TX]
April 3, 2022
By Karen Swallow Prior
This column is part of our ongoing Opinion commentary on faith, called Living Our Faith. Find the full series here.
Twenty years had passed since the last time I’d read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. A novel doesn’t change, no matter how much time goes by. But a reader changes. And the world does, too.
Last summer, when I returned to this classic — the bane of many a high school student — as part of a project of editing and annotating a series introducing classics to Christian readers, I was taken aback by something I had never seen in the book before.
Like most readers, I’d always understood The Scarlet Letter to be a story about adultery. After all, the assumed meaning of the titular “A,” pinned as a badge of dishonor to Hester Prynne’s breast, is to mark her for that particular sin. But what I realized upon this recent reading is that The Scarlet Letter isn’t a tale of adultery. It’s one of clergy sexual abuse.
Clergy sexual abuse is defined by researchers at Baylor University as taking place “when a person with religious authority intentionally uses their role, position, and power to sexually harass, exploit, or engage in sexual activity with a person.” While we often think of sexual abuse by clergy as occurring primarily against children, adults are vulnerable, too. According to the same research at Baylor, clergy sexual abuse “is about the misuse of power by the perpetrator and the inability of the victim to provide consent because of the power differential.”
This power differential between a minister and one who is under his care is often tremendous, regardless of the age of the victim. A pastor often knows the sins, struggles, pains and weaknesses of a parishioner. When performing his role rightly, a minister teaches, leads, nurtures and stewards the whole of a person in a profound way. Such influence is immeasurable as is the trust given to one who holds it.
In The Scarlet Letter, no one knows that Hester has been exploited by the town’s minister, the Rev. Dimmesdale. The townspeople know only that Hester’s husband has been away for years and that Hester has borne a child in his absence. The fact that she refuses to name her child’s father only increases their view of her complicity in the crime. She is deemed an adulteress and is punished accordingly, not only in an official way by the governing authorities, but also in the unofficial — worse — way of being shunned by her community and cast out.
Yet, the novel sees more than the society it depicts could (or would) see.
Early in the novel, when Hester is brought before government officials who have met to determine whether she is fit to raise her child, Hester appeals to the Rev. Dimmesdale, who is not only her child’s father and a respected clergyman, but also Hester’s own pastor.
“Speak thou for me!” she implores. “Thou wast my pastor, and hadst charge of my soul, and knowest me better than these men can.”
Here Hawthorne clearly depicts the truth that Dimmesdale was entrusted, as all pastors are, with the precious soul of his parishioner. Yet, he abused that trust in the deepest of ways. As one survivor of clergy sexual abuse said to me recently, Dimmesdale knew Hester so well not because he was her lover, but because he was her pastor.
What Hawthorne understood a century and a half ago, many in the church are struggling to accept today.
Mercifully, the #metoo and #churchtoo movements have helped not only to bring about justice for some sexual abuse survivors, but they have also helped to raise awareness for many of us about just how wrong some things are that once were quietly accepted, or worse, viewed as normal. Activists, hashtags and journalists — and most of all, survivors themselves — have played significant roles in removing our cultural blinders so that we can see things that have been around us, in front of us, or even happened to us all along. I have no doubt that their work is what made me read this novel differently from when I last read it years ago.
To be sure, literature — even great literature — is always a product of its time. Yet, one of the qualities that makes classics such as The Scarlet Letter good is that these works offer a complicated, nuanced view of the human condition, human relations and the world that transcends the particularities of their context. Hawthorne and his contemporary readers may not have been reading from the ample research on clergy sexual abuse that is available today, but Hawthorne understood the dynamics at play in a remarkable way.
Sometimes it takes stories far removed from our own circumstances and interests for us to face what is harder to face when it is right in front of us — or when it is us.
Consider the story the prophet Nathan told King David in 2 Samuel. David was guilty of taking another man’s wife and then having that man murdered, but the king would not face the fact of his sin. Then Nathan came and told David a story of a rich man in possession of many sheep and cattle, yet took for himself the sole, precious lamb of a poor man. David immediately recognized the evil done by the rich man in the story and called angrily for justice. Then Nathan said to David, “You are the man!”
Notably, the Bible doesn’t use the Hebrew word for “rape” found elsewhere in the Old Testament. Nevertheless, in taking Bathsheba, David had abused his power and God-given authority in an egregious way, and in Nathan’s story, Bathsheba is likened to an innocent lamb.
And the fact is that throughout centuries of literature, countless stories are told in which the lines between rape, ravishment and seduction are so blurry as to be nearly nonexistent. For a long time, sadly, the only thing that mattered was whether a woman retains her virginity — regardless of her role or agency in a situation. Thankfully, as our understandings change, our laws and policies are — slowly — catching up to what prophets and visionary writers have been telling us for a long time.
Four decades after Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter here in America, Thomas Hardy wrote a novel exposing the unjust, tragic consequences of blindness to sexual hypocrisy in late Victorian England. That novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, tells the story of a young, poor and innocent girl sexually assaulted by her wealthy employer, only to be later abandoned by her husband upon his learning on their wedding night that she is not a virgin. Neither is he a virgin, but the double standard of Hardy’s day made no room for moral consistency, and that is the injustice Hardy wants to expose.
Interestingly, the multiple drafts and editions of the novel show that even with the aim of exposing his society’s hypocrisy and cruelty in its treatment of women, Hardy had no fixed or certain category for what was perpetrated upon his heroine. Nevertheless, Hardy vividly portrays the truth that when those who have power over others abuse that power by preying sexually (or otherwise) on those in their care, they are guilty of great sin.
I was recently asked by a fellow member of my church denomination what I think the greatest threat to our shared conservative theological tradition is. Our denomination exists in a culture which, increasingly, views us the way Hawthorne viewed his Puritan ancestors and Hardy viewed his fellow Victorians — with suspicion and disdain for perceived severity and hypocrisy. Thus, increasingly, Christians who hold to conservative views of Scripture, the creational order and the church itself are facing criticisms, not only from unbelievers, but from fellow Christians with more progressive views. And a lot of those criticisms are sticking. What my friend meant in asking his question was whether I thought this liberal view or that popular book, this progressive pastor or that critical scholar, posed the most significant threat.
But I don’t think any of these are the biggest problem we face. “The biggest threat to conservatives in the church,” I told him, “is our failure to take sex abuse seriously.”
The people whose beliefs are based on strict understandings of scripture, gender roles, and sexual morality need to be the ones taking sex abuse more seriously than anyone else. Such acts violate image bearers of God in precisely the way in which he designed us to multiply image bearers. We cannot stand for the sacredness of every human life and the sacredness of sex without defending bodies and souls against the very acts that violate both of these at once.
A notable detail of the story of Nathan and David is that the text says the Lord sent Nathan to convey the truth which David refused to see. This was a gift from God. David received it, and that made all the difference.
The power Nathan’s parable had to help David see a truth he didn’t want to see is expressed memorably in a poem by Emily Dickinson, a contemporary of Nathaniel Hawthorne:
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
We can turn to secular prophets like Dickinson, Hawthorne and Hardy to see a truth so harsh it threatens to blind us.
But we shouldn’t have to. We’ve seen it all before.
Karen Swallow Prior is a research professor of English and Christianity and culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. She wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.