Shiny Happy People and trauma-informed pastoring

Thanks for your patience with my Substack break because Major Depressive Disorder! I have no doubt this will happen from time to time. Sometimes our bodies get sick, and sometimes our brains get sick, as I often tell my kids, and every once in a while my brain needs a chance to get well — or at least as well as it can be. Poor brain.

I'm often on the fence as to whether or not I should watch documentaries or listen to podcasts about abuse and trauma in the church. I have a good sense of that, some from personal experience. But even more so, I find that the line between education and voyeurism is thin. And I’m careful about what I expose myself to because I can only imbibe so much harm to others before I find it difficult to keep going. So I went into Shiny Happy People (SHP) with some trepidation (“am I just fascinated with this insular cult? Is this just another detached fascination with difference and trauma?”).

There were several times I found myself surprised. I thought of IBLP as another planet. I was not expecting the eerie sense of overlap between IBLP and the courtship, marriage-driven-dating, and sexual fear from my own high school and college experiences deep in evangelical mainstream culture.

I’m being attentive to my own processing and care (also not something I was expecting to need). But I’m especially glad that I watched this as a pastor. SHP helped me to return to and deepen mu attention to trauma-informed approach to pastor ministry. Here are a few things I’m thinking about:

Trials and tribulation
If you know Mennonites, we are big into this (been through a few of these in our formation as a tradition!). Survivors of abuse in the Mennonite church have offered similar warnings to what I heard in SHP – connecting holiness to suffering opens the door to letting abuse run wild. One of the ways that I’ve taken this to heart in ministry is that I refuse to give reasons, explanation, or justifications for suffering. “Suffering just is,” I have said many times. It happens because we are people in the world. The best we can do is help one another through it, turning to one another and God for support and care. But the goal is always the cessation of suffering and a return to wholeness. We mourn when this is not possible, and we make what good we can of the rest.

Marriage Anxieties
I have a lot of respect for people’s anxieties about marriage and the institution overall. It is not my role to get people to the altar who are living together (I wish this went without saying) or to convince people to stay in a marriage that is causing harm for one or both partners. People carry a lot of trauma evangelical cultures around sex and purity, and from their own experiences of seeing marriages around them or in their family. I’m thinking more about the tender spaces this creates and how to invest in that healing – and certainly that healing isn’t always marriage.  

Matthew 18
“If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone.” In the Mennonite church we know this as the Scripture that John Howard Yoder used to intimidate his victims by refusing an accountability process unless they met with him one on one. As a result, I’m cautious to name this as the process we use in the context of our church. Instead, it is a process we use when certain criteria are met 1) this process only works if the power differential between the parties will not lead to coercion or threat. So if a boss and his employee both go to my church, this would not be the process we use. 2) The conflict is not about abuse. This is a minefield of re-traumatization and we need professionals involved 3) The church is equipped and healthy enough to engage in the next parts (bring this matter to the elders, then to the whole church). If there’s no process, no way to remove a harmful person, and no culture of facing conflict I’m not going to ask someone to take on the first part because we can’t do the work of the rest. And 99% of the time I’ve experienced conflict in church it is best resolved by talking it out with the person rather than triangulating, complaining in secret, or being passive aggressive. I don’t need to whip out a Bible verse to say, “the best person to bring your concern to is the person with whom you have a concern.” And if the person shares with me what’s going on, I can walk them through whether or not it is healthy to engage on their own.

Safe Sanctuary Policies
SHP was helpful for me in thinking creatively and rigorously about ways that we can be on guard as a church, how we can encourage accountability and learning beyond a couple trainings and a background check. One way I’ve done that in the past is to use children’s time as a way to educate both church adults and children. I’ve done lessons on “God gave you a body that is YOURS,” asking to hug first, the difference between secrets and surprises, and have asked that holistic sexuality education be a part of our education process.

Questioning the Celebrity Narrative
The “problem of celebrity” narrative distracts from the everyday experiences of coercive power in the church. Hundreds of SBC pastors and hundreds of Catholic priests, many from small towns, whose names most of us did not know sexually abused children and adults. It wasn’t celebrity that led them there – they abused through the aide of hierarchy, power, lack of accountability, structures that protected men, and intertwined supremacy cultures. Every father in IBLP lived this out in their home and was given the opportunity for abuse. We need to spend our time on the ordinary, everyday structures of oppression that animate the cultures where the vast majority of people experience abuse.

I have lingering questions that didn’t get answered in SHP that I think deserved air time. The most significant: why is no one talking about this as a white supremacist movement? Because that was a whole lot of white people trying to populate themselves into global dominance and elected power.

IBLP promoted anti-miscegenation, naturalizing race by claiming God created distinctive races who had to stick to their own kind. Mike Huckabee? Very racist. John Rice advocated for segregation during the Civil Rights movement. IBLP drew a direct connection between “music with a beat” and African cultures as Satanic.

I know you can’t do everything in a documentary, but we’ve got to start talking about the linkage between the supremacy cultures of racism, sexism, and homophobia.