The Courage to Have This Conversation

A Reflection on sexual violence, human dignity, and the moral responsibility of the Church

There are some things that are difficult to write about, and there are some things that are difficult to read about. This week’s Parish Post may be both. In more than a decade of ordained ministry, I have written about any number of challenging subjects, but I cannot recall struggling quite so much with what I wanted to say, how I wanted to say it, or even whether I should say it at all. I have spent more time thinking, praying, writing, and rewriting this reflection than perhaps any other I have offered you. I am utterly convinced we must talk about that this, regardless of the difficulty.

I know that whenever clergy address something in the news, particularly something that has become the subject of public controversy, there is a temptation to interpret our words through a political or ideological lens. Sometimes we wonder whether the Church is straying beyond its proper jurisdiction, whether the pulpit is becoming a platform for social commentary rather than the proclamation of the Gospel. I understand that concern, and I share it. The Church should never confuse its mission with the political or ideological preoccupations of the moment.

But neither can the Church surrender its moral voice simply because a subject has become controversial. The Gospel is not always comfortable. Indeed, much of what Jesus taught was profoundly uncomfortable, particularly when he challenged the assumptions, behaviors, and social arrangements that allowed people to disregard the dignity of their neighbors. Sometimes the Gospel calls us to confront things we would rather not acknowledge, to hear stories we would rather not hear, and to recognize our own participation in patterns of behavior we would prefer to believe have nothing to do with us.

That is where I find myself this week.

I have been deeply grieved by the news coming out of Cornell University concerning allegations of sexual violence involving a young woman and a fraternity. I do not pretend to know all the circumstances surrounding what has been reported, nor am I qualified or interested in rendering a legal judgment. There are processes for establishing facts and determining criminal responsibility, and those processes matter. But the moral questions raised by these reports are not dependent upon the outcome of any particular investigation. They concern something far larger, far older, and far more pervasive than a single incident on a college campus.

And I believe they concern us at Christ Church in a particular way.

We are a parish that lives in the shadow of Kennesaw State University, and I mean that in the very best sense. Our congregation includes students, faculty, staff, professors, and administrators from KSU and other institutions of higher learning. We have invested considerable energy in cultivating relationships with the educational communities around us. We count among our parish leadership people who have devoted their professional lives to the formation, education, and care of young people. We are not detached observers of university life. We are part of that community, and its young people are part of ours.

So I am asking you to stay with me in this conversation, even if your instinct is to turn away. Particularly if your instinct is to turn away. I know this subject is awkward, painful, and uncomfortable. I know that some will wonder why their priest is writing about it at all. But I believe with all my heart that this is precisely the kind of conversation the Church must be willing to have, and that Christian hope, if it is to mean anything at all, must be accompanied by truth, accountability, and repentance.

Because for me, this is not simply a news story. It is a pastoral reality I have encountered again and again for more than thirteen years.

One of the greatest privileges of ordained ministry is being invited into the most intimate and vulnerable places of people’s lives. Over the years, and particularly in nearly a decade as your rector, I have been entrusted with stories that people have sometimes never spoken aloud to another human being. I have sat with dozens upon dozens of women who have shared experiences of sexual violence, coercion, exploitation, humiliation, and trauma. I have listened to accounts of things done to them as children, as teenagers, as college students, and as adults. Some of these experiences occurred decades ago, and yet the pain remains as immediate and devastating as if they happened yesterday.

I cannot adequately describe the weight of some of those conversations. There are stories that have left me struggling to find words, stories that have challenged my understanding of human cruelty, and stories that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. They are not mine to tell, and I would never betray the sacred trust with which they were shared. But I can tell you that they have profoundly shaped the way I understand the pastoral vocation, the brokenness of our world, and the Church’s responsibility to speak clearly about human dignity.

And here is something I desperately want you to understand: these are not strangers living somewhere else. They are people you know.

They sit beside you in the pews. They receive Holy Communion alongside you. They serve on committees, sing in choirs, teach children, volunteer in ministries, and gather around tables in our Parish Hall. They share coffee and pastries with you after worship. They laugh, pray, work, raise families, and participate in the ordinary rhythms of our common life. Many carry wounds of which you have no knowledge.

If you believe that you do not know anyone who has experienced sexual violence, I would invite you to reconsider that assumption. It may simply mean that no one has felt safe enough to share that part of their story with you.

I do not say that as an accusation. I say it because silence is one of the great burdens borne by those who have suffered this kind of harm. Shame, fear, self-blame, the possibility of not being believed, and the prospect of having one’s most painful experiences subjected to public scrutiny can make disclosure extraordinarily difficult. Too often, the person who has been harmed is left carrying not only the original injury but also the burden of explaining, defending, and justifying their own suffering.

And too often, our first instinct is to find some reason to make the story less troubling.

We tell ourselves that our children would never behave that way, that we raised them better, that we know our sons, that we would have recognized the warning signs. We ask questions about alcohol, clothing, relationships, judgment, or why someone was in a particular place at a particular time. Sometimes those questions are presented as reasonable attempts to understand what happened. But sometimes, whether we recognize it or not, they are ways of reassuring ourselves that such things happen to other people, in other families, under circumstances that could never touch our own lives.

It is a comforting illusion, but it is an illusion nonetheless.

When someone finds the courage to disclose an experience of sexual violence, our first pastoral responsibility is not to interrogate, speculate, or search for reasons to minimize what we have heard. It is to listen with compassion, to take the disclosure seriously, and to recognize the extraordinary vulnerability of the person speaking. This does not require us to abandon fairness, evidence, or due process. It requires us to remember that the person before us is a human being whose dignity is not contingent upon their ability to persuade us of their suffering.

And I want to speak particularly to the men among us, myself included.

For generations, we have placed an extraordinary burden upon women to protect themselves from the possibility of sexual violence. We teach our daughters to be careful where they go, what they drink, whom they trust, how they dress, and whether they walk alone. We tell them to travel with friends, to keep an eye on one another, and to let someone know when they arrive home safely. Some of that advice is prudent in a world that is not always safe. But have we stopped to consider the moral absurdity of a culture in which so much of the responsibility for preventing sexual violence is placed upon those most likely to experience it?

Why have we devoted so much energy to teaching women how to protect themselves and comparatively so little to teaching boys and men what it means to honor another person’s autonomy, vulnerability, and dignity?

This is not an indictment of every man. Nor is it a suggestion that sexual violence is exclusively committed by men or experienced by women. We know that is not true. But we also know that patterns of sexual violence are profoundly shaped by attitudes about masculinity, entitlement, power, and the ways we teach young men to understand themselves in relation to others.

And the Church has something essential to say about that.

Christianity does not teach that human sexuality is shameful or inherently corrupt. Quite the opposite. We believe that our bodies are part of God’s good creation, that affection and intimacy can be profound expressions of love, and that human relationships are meant to reflect something of the generosity, tenderness, fidelity, and self-giving character of divine love.

But we live in a culture that has increasingly learned to treat sexuality as a commodity. Bodies become objects to be consumed, intimacy becomes something to be acquired, and other people become instruments for satisfying our own desires. What ought to be grounded in mutual affection, respect, responsibility, and care can become distorted by power, entitlement, coercion, and the pursuit of gratification without regard for the humanity of another person.

The Church cannot simply lament this distortion while refusing to talk about it. Nor can we respond by retreating into embarrassment, euphemism, or silence. We must recover the courage to teach our children, our teenagers, and one another that sexuality is a sacred dimension of human life, worthy of reverence precisely because it involves the vulnerability and dignity of persons created in the image of God.

And when something sacred is violated, the damage can be catastrophic.

I think this is where our baptismal theology becomes especially important. Every time we renew our Baptismal Covenant, we promise, with God’s help, to strive for justice and peace among all people and to respect the dignity of every human being. We say those words so often that I wonder whether we sometimes forget how demanding they really are.

Respecting the dignity of every human being is not merely a commitment to politeness, tolerance, or treating people kindly when it is convenient. It is a recognition that every person possesses an inherent worth that no one else has the right to diminish. That dignity belongs to the person we love and the person we dislike, to the stranger and the friend, to the vulnerable and the powerful. It belongs to every woman who has been violated, every man who has suffered in silence, and every child who deserves to grow into adulthood knowing that their body is not an object for someone else’s use.

Surely, respecting that dignity is the minimum of what Christian discipleship requires of us.

But I think the Gospel asks even more.

It asks us to examine the cultures we create and tolerate, the jokes we laugh at, the behaviors we excuse, the conversations we avoid, and the lessons we communicate to our children, sometimes without ever intending to teach them. It asks fathers and mothers, teachers and coaches, clergy and mentors, to be intentional about the formation of young people who understand that love never requires coercion, that intimacy is never an entitlement, and that another person’s vulnerability is never an invitation to exploit them.

It also asks us to consider whether the Church itself has always been a safe place for these conversations. I fear that too often we have treated human sexuality as something so embarrassing or inappropriate that we have surrendered the entire conversation to popular culture, pornography, peer pressure, and whatever our children happen to encounter on their phones. We have sometimes confused modesty with silence and moral formation with simply telling young people what not to do.

We can do better. We must do better.

The Church should be a place where we can speak honestly about the goodness of the human body, the sacredness of intimacy, the meaning of consent, the responsibilities of love, and the devastating reality of sexual violence. We should be forming young men and women who understand not only the boundaries of acceptable behavior but the deeper theological reasons those boundaries exist. We should be teaching that another person’s humanity is never subordinate to our desires, and that genuine love is inseparable from freedom, mutuality, and care.

And when harm has occurred, the Church must be a place where truth can be spoken, where those who have suffered are met with compassion, where accountability is taken seriously, and where repentance is understood as something far more demanding than an apology.

Because Christian hope is not the denial of suffering. It is the conviction that suffering and sin do not have the final word.

I want to be especially careful here. The language of forgiveness, grace, and redemption is precious to us as Christians, but it has also sometimes been used to pressure victims into silence, to excuse wrongdoing, or to avoid the difficult work of accountability. That is a terrible distortion of the Gospel. Forgiveness cannot be demanded of someone who has been harmed, and reconciliation cannot be manufactured by pretending that an injury has not occurred. Repentance requires truthfulness. Accountability requires consequences. And healing, when it comes, often requires time, patience, professional care, and the faithful companionship of people who are willing to listen without trying to make the pain disappear.

I do not know what the investigations surrounding the events reported at Cornell will ultimately establish. But I know that sexual violence is not rare, that its consequences can endure for a lifetime, and that the Church cannot regard it as someone else’s problem.

We are called to something better than silence.

We are called to be a community where those who have been harmed are not made to feel ashamed, where young people are taught to recognize the sacred dignity of themselves and others, where men are encouraged to examine the responsibilities that accompany their strength and influence, and where the moral formation of our children is understood to be among the most important work entrusted to us.

And perhaps most importantly, we are called to be a community where the wounded can find reason to hope.

To those of you who have shared your stories with me over the years, I want you to know that I have not forgotten them. Your trust has been one of the most humbling gifts of my priesthood. I wish I could tell you that I have always known what to say or how to help, but I have not. I have often felt woefully inadequate in the presence of suffering I could neither explain nor repair. What I can tell you is that I have listened, I have grieved with you, and I have come to understand more deeply through your courage what it means for the Church to be the Body of Christ in a wounded world.

And to those who have never told anyone, or who are not yet ready to speak, please hear this: what happened to you does not diminish your worth. You are not defined by what someone else chose to do. You are not beyond the reach of love, dignity, healing, or grace. You are beloved of God, wholly and without qualification.

I began by acknowledging how uncomfortable this conversation is, and I suspect that some of us will still feel uncomfortable when we reach its conclusion. Perhaps that is not entirely a bad thing. Discomfort can be the beginning of moral awakening, particularly when it moves us beyond the easy reassurance that these are problems belonging to other people.

We are a parish surrounded by young people who are learning what it means to become adults, by families raising sons and daughters, and by educators entrusted with shaping the next generation. We have an extraordinary opportunity, and I believe an equally extraordinary responsibility, to bear witness to a different understanding of human relationships, one rooted not in domination or entitlement, but in the love of God revealed in Jesus Christ.

That work begins with the courage to speak, the humility to listen, the willingness to be accountable, and the conviction that every human being bears the image of God.

It is not political. It is not ideological. It is the Gospel.

And it is our work.

Pax et bonum,

Fr. Ben