NASHVILLE (TN)
Tennessean [Nashville TN]
August 15, 2023
By Liam Adams
- “Disobedient Women,” a new book by journalist Sarah Stankorb centers the voices of women who sounded the alarm on church abuse.
- Book looks at abuse in Christian homeschooling movement, the Southern Baptist Convention, Sovereign Grace Ministries and features the stories of local Nashville figures.
Stories about the exposure of church abuse scandals that are now the subjects of popular Hulu and Amazon Prime docuseries haven’t always centered on the women behind the effort to expose wrongdoing.
First with the help of blogs and now with social media, mostly women sounded the alarm on spiritual and sexual abuse happening within denominations and parachurch organizations.
“I got very irritated that a major piece of this was being ignored,” journalist and author Sarah Stankorb said.
Stankorb has been following these women-led movements for more than a decade through pieces for The Washington Post, The New York Times, Vogue, Marie Claire and others. She’s now chronicling those movements and their interconnectedness in a new book, “Disobedient Women: How a small group of faithful women exposed abuse, brought down powerful pastors, and ignited an evangelical reckoning.”
Tracing these movements chronologically, Stankorb looks at early bloggers who called out abuse in the Christian homeschooling movement and the Southern Baptist Convention — such as Christa Brown, Amy Smith and Dee Parsons — to leaders of the newer #ChurchToo and “exvangelical” movements using other social media, like Nashville author Emily Joy Allison.
“For some, they don’t necessarily see what they’re doing as extraordinary,” Stankorb said about the women she interviewed. “It’s more a moral call they’re trying to answer.”
In a conversation with The Tennessean, Stankorb shared more reflections from her work behind the book.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
mong the women your book focuses on, why is the act of speaking up significant and what’s the impact?
Stankorb: Speaking up in the church was a major test of their faith and it really forced them to differentiate between a specific church leadership and what they felt God demanded of them. For some people, it crushed their faith or liberated them from a poorer version of faith. I intentionally included in the book people who are still immensely faithful and people who have no faith. It’s really interesting to see people who have a shared struggle who come at it different ways.
How has that shift in personal beliefs affected their engagement with those religious institutions in which the abuse occurred?
Stankorb: More have withdrawn from personal affiliation even if they’re still advocating for reform within specific bodies or movements, like the Christian homeschool movement. There’s a point where, for your own mental health, it’s difficult to remain within an institution that refuses to change and is often actively attacking you; it’s harmful. So, some have switched to other churches and others have found, “I rather not be affiliated with any church at all.”
In addition to diversity of faith identities, what other perspectives were important to include in the book?
Stankorb: Writing about evangelical culture, it can be very white. The early parts of these movements were very white back when it was blogs and Tumblr. Now it has really blown up on TikTok, for example, and the field of organizing online is more diverse. So, that helped toward a chronological end of the book.
Also, I interviewed straight folks who love their gay friends but don’t believe in gay marriage and there are queer women, trans women and those who identify as non-binary.
For the larger story you wanted to tell, why was it important to seek out such an array of voices?
Stankorb: Toward the end of the reporting, I went to the Great Homeschooling Convention, which came to my city. I went to a section on girlhood, and I thought I knew what they were going to say. It was a little bit about modesty but most of it was transphobic hysteria, basically. Session after session I went to, there was a lot of fear around gender.
As I was processing through the book, what became clear to me was that because these women were treated as this underclass, their claims were not taken seriously and what happened was covered up, it became a radical act for them to speak up. I see that game again of squishing down one set of voices to keep another in power.
Other recent SBC abuse-related stories:The story of this Florida church’s ouster shows the pitfalls facing the SBC on abuse reform