Tennessee pastor resigns after ‘sexual incident’ with minor – By Tara Isabella Burton (vox.com) / March 21 2018
Andy Savage’s resignation is a sign the evangelical church may be changing in the wake of #metoo
A Tennessee megachurch pastor has resigned his position two months after admitting to sexual misconduct with a minor 20 years ago. It’s a striking turnaround from the original evangelical response to Andy Savage’s admissions in January, which included a standing ovation after he confessed to the incident during a Sunday sermon.
This week, Savage offered an unqualified apology for his behavior. “When Jules cried out for justice,” Savage said Tuesday, “I carelessly turned the topic to my own story of moral change…I now believe it’s appropriate for me to resign from my staff position at Highpoint Church and step away from ministry in order to do everything I can to right the wrongs of the past.”
Highpoint likewise issued a statement of apology, saying that it was “defensive rather than empathetic in its initial reaction to Ms. Jules Woodson’s communication” and that it would “develop a deeper understanding of an appropriate, more compassionate response to victims of abuse.”
The apologetic tone of Savage and his church alike heralds a long-overdue culture shift. Both Savage and Highpoint Church’s statements suggest that the evangelical community may be evolving, albeit slowly, on issues of sexual misconduct within the church, and may be more willing to look at sexual crimes as abuses of power, rather than shared sins of “temptation.”
Andy Savage’s case revealed the structural failure of his whole church community
Andy Savage became one of the faces of the evangelical church’s post-#MeToo reckoning when Woodson publicly accused him of sexually assaulting her when she was a 17-year-old high school senior attending the church, where he was her 22-year-old youth pastor.
After unsuccessfully trying to reach Savage by email, Woodson posted a full account of her story on an abuse survivors’ blog. According to Woodson’s account, Woodson socialized with Savage and others one night in 1998, Savage offered to drive her home. Woodson remembered Savage drove past her house, promising her a surprise — which she took to mean something innocuous, like ice cream. “I remember feeling special and excited, as in my mind, he obviously wanted to spend more time with me before taking me home,” Woodson writes.
Then he pulled into an isolated dirt road. Woodson writes:
He turned the headlights off. Suddenly, Andy unzipped his jeans and pulled out his penis. He asked me to suck it. I was scared and embarrassed, but I did it. I remember feeling that this must mean that Andy loved me. He then asked me to unbutton my shirt. I did. He started touching me over my bra and then lifted my bra up and began touching my breasts.
After what I believe to have been about 5 minutes of this going on, he suddenly stopped, got out of the truck and ran around the back and to my side before falling to his knees. … Now I was terrified and ashamed. I remember him pleading, while he was on his knees with his hands up on his head, ‘Oh my god, oh my god. What have I done? Oh my god, I’m so sorry. You can’t tell anyone Jules, please.’
Savage’s initial response to the incident characterized it as a regrettable sexual encounter, one in which both people behaved sinfully. In January, Savage told his Memphis congregation, Highpoint Church, in a live-streamed sermon, “Until now, I did not know there was unfinished business with Jules. Jules, I am deeply sorry for my actions 20 years ago. I remain committed to cooperate with you toward forgiveness and healing.”
His congregation responded with a standing ovation.
Later press coverage from the Washington Post, the New York Times, and others was less forgiving, and, in its wake, Savage’s forthcoming book on Christian marriage was pulled by Christian publishing company Bethany House, and he was subsequently placed on leave.
To his congregants, Savage had repented of the incident. He took the necessary steps to correct it, including telling his wife about it before their marriage, as he said in a later statement. He had sinned and committed an act of sexual impurity with another person, and he sought forgiveness from God as necessary, and through that forgiveness had been transformed. Although later media coverage prompted a backlash, the church’s immediate response to the accusation tells us something about evangelical culture.
Both the initial incident and Savage’s church’s early reaction to it revealed why #MeToo may have had difficulties in finding a footing in evangelical communities — even as Savage’s ultimate acceptance of responsibility, and that of his church, suggests that #MeToo may have had some success in reframing the discourse.
The events of nearly 20 years ago, and their aftermath, underscore how difficult questions of consent, power, and harassment are in a culture that views relationships through the paradigm of purity, forgiveness, and sin.
Woodson’s story — not uncommon in evangelical communities — is also the story of a community unused to thinking about sexual ethics outside of sexual theology.
The Savage case reveals the fault lines of American evangelical sexual culture
Since the Savage case has come to national prominence, Woodson has spoken out about the ways in which evangelical church culture contributed to the trauma of her experience. In an interview with the New York Times, Woodson recalled how, when she was trying to report the incident, she felt church leaders minimized “the severity of what had happened. I was being blamed. It was in their eyes a consensual sexual sin…We as a church of all places should be getting this right. It’s unfathomable to me that the secular world, Hollywood…are taking a stand. The church should have been the first group to stand up and say we will not allow this.”
Understanding why it did not requires understanding the evangelical culture that shaped them.
As I have written previously, in many evangelical churches, questions of consent often come second to questions of purity and sinfulness. All sex (except for heterosexual marital sex) is considered innately sinful and to be avoided, and participation in it corrupts and contaminates both participants. In such a mentality, consent becomes all but irrelevant. Sex is as much about the participants’ relationship with God, as it is each other.
Often, such a mentality leaves women in the community without the agency to contextualize a sexual advance in a meaningful or nuanced way. Sex is either shared in loving marriage or an immoral and dirty expression of sin, rarely anything in the middle. For example, Woodson recalls agreeing to have oral sex with Savage, believing that his advances automatically proved that he “loved her.”
Woodson’s difficulty reporting the incident speaks to this dynamic. In her blog post, Woodson recalls there were initially no consequences to Savage’s actions. She reports telling her church’s associate pastor, Larry Cotton, about the incident. Cotton suggested that the incident might have been consensual. (Cotton has since been placed on leave from his post at his current church, Austin Stone Community Church, pending an internal review.)
Savage remained in a leadership role, moderating pro-abstinence events, among others. Only when Woodson spoke out in her female discipleship group some weeks later did the church address Savage’s actions by letting him go quietly and holding a going-away reception for him. According to Woodson, Savage was permitted to tell church-goers that he only “made a poor decision and that it was time for him to move on from our church.”
Writing in New York magazine earlier this year about her evangelical upbringing, Dani Fankhauser recalls a similar mentality in her community: how she was unable to dissociate her teenage sexual feelings from a boy from a certainty that God had planned for her to marry him. “When a Christian dating book, When God Writes Your Love Story, began making the rounds among my friends,” Fankhauser writes, “I thought, he already has.”
Likewise, while the pastors to whom Woodson told her story cast doubt on her credibility because she didn’t say “no,” it’s important to remember that, within the evangelical community in which Woodson grew up, female submission — particularly to authority — was (and is) seen as a virtue to be prized. To be obedient and to be submissive, especially to male authority figures, is — in most evangelical communities— a de facto virtue.
While this does not automatically strip any woman in that community of her agency, of course, the culture can create an environment in which young women and men alike aren’t given the tools necessary to conceptualize, let alone practice, consent-driven sexual behavior.
Critics of the #MeToo movement like Daphne Merkin allege that feminists are denying women agency by assuming that they are not capable of consenting to (or refusing) sex on their own terms. While this argument is spurious, we would do well to consider that there are cultural environments in which men and women alike are not socialized to have the vocabulary that would allow for refusal.
What does “consent” mean in a cultural environment in which the very idea is alien to both parties?
For Savage’s congregation, according to standard evangelical theology of sexuality, his sin and repentance were primarily about the relationship between Savage and God. He’d sinned against God by succumbing to temptation to sexual impurity — a sin that, in the congregation’s eyes, Woodson and Savage had shared equal responsibility for — and thus, by repenting, he had restored that relationship with God. Such a narrative was echoed in the initial statement of Highpoint Church’s lead pastor, Chris Conlee, who said he had “total confidence in the redemptive process Andy went through under his leadership in Texas.”
To the congregation, admitting that sin was part of the process by which Savage approached leading a new, more godly life.
Because Woodson had seemed to consent to sexual activity with Savage (even as the power dynamics of the case blurred the validity of that consent), she had been treated in the immediate aftermath of the event as a willing participant. It’s worth noting that Savage disclosed that he “shared every aspect of this situation” with his wife before their engagement. Such language suggests he has admitted to engaging in a sexual misdeed, not an assault.
Savage’s exhortation, 20 years later, to “cooperate with you [Woodson] toward forgiveness and healing” furthered that narrative even as it put the onus on Woodson: forgiveness is something both parties need to seek.
Likewise, the way in which Savage initially framed the story to his church — as something bad he has done in the past, and which God (rather than Woodson) has redeemed him for — is emblematic of “forgiveness culture,” as Ruth Graham has already noted for Slate. Writes Graham about the evangelical church’s increasing focus on “brokenness” — open admission of flaw and sin — rather than moral perfection in recent years:
It’s hard to complain about a shift in emphasis from punishment to grace—both concepts are baked into the Gospel message—but it can produce disturbing side effects. In Savage’s case, there’s the implication that repenting means he should suffer no further consequences for his actions. (Even if Savage pursues forgiveness from his victim, his family, and his community, that does not mean he is fit for public ministry.
In such a worldview, past misdeeds are to be overcome on a personal level, without ramifications for the victim or the community at large. A Christian simply leaves behind sin in favor of salvation. Savage’s perceived bravery in giving “testimony” of his sin, in this mentality, outweighed the need to punish it — at least, at first.
The Savage case is the story of a wider cultural failure
Is Woodson’s story the story of a sexual assault, as she alleges? That is unclear. Woodson argues that it is, citing a section of the Texas penal code that says that consent cannot be granted if a member of the clergy is abusing his or her spiritual power to sleep with a member of the congregation. (Whether a youth pastor like Savage would be considered a member of the “clergy” is unclear).
It is, however, a tragedy — making visible a culture of shame and silence, in which “purity” comes at the expense of mutuality and “forgiveness” comes at the expense of restitution.
In other words, this isn’t about one predator and one victim. It’s a story about an entire culture that needs to change. That Savage and his church ultimately accepted responsibility for their actions suggests that it just might.
https://www.vox.com/2018/1/17/16880278/andy-savage-sexual-misconduct-youth-pastor-evangelicals
