You’ve seen it before - it becomes known that a certain faith leader has had an affair or committed some type of abuse, and what happens? The couple works on their marriage, the person goes to therapy, and eventually, boom! Everyone’s healed, right?
Welcome to a conversation I recently had with podcaster and friend Amy Fritz of the Untangled Faith podcast about this alarming pattern in faith settings. We explore what we’ve seen, what I’ve experienced, and what should happen instead.
And one of the most meaningful apologies I’ve received.
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Melissa Hogan: So I framed this as what do you do when your spouse, the person you promise to love and cherish forever, the person you committed to under God and inherent in that is the desire to support them and protect them and cover their faults and believe them. Give them the benefit of the doubt. What do you do when someone accuses them of harm or what happens when you suspect them of harm to you or to other people?
It's just almost an impossible situation.
Amy Fritz: I love that framing. I had been thinking about this conversation for a little while, and so I was really glad to get it on the calendar and also glad to have you come Melissa, because I felt like you have seen this from a lot of different angles and so you can wear several hats in this conversation.
So Melissa J. Hogan, welcome to the podcast. I'm glad you're here.
Melissa Hogan: It's good to be back.
Amy Fritz: Should we start with a scenario kind of like what you just framed that we've seen very often? A wife somehow or another finds out that her husband has betrayed her, either cheated on her or has done something else. The world is aware, her community is becoming aware of, and then what?
What does the church in so many times, so many times say? Let us figure out how to restore this marriage so that everybody's back together and moving along as fast as possible. And then it becomes a testimony.
Melissa Hogan: I would actually reverse that because I think that is how the church and the Christian community often frames it as— the husband betrayed the wife. But really, how I see these situations now is that the one of the partners, in my case, the man and often in the situations we're talking about, the man has harmed people. So, when we look at it in the sense of he's betrayed his spouse, it frames it as a marriage challenge, whether a severe or light, but it frames it as a marriage challenge instead of this is a him issue.
So much of the damage to women or spouses in a marriage have been when something is taken from, it is that person's character and behavior and pattern of behavior issue, and turning that somehow into— it's a marriage dynamic that's happening here.
Amy Fritz: Yes. And also this unfair idea, another burden thing that is unnecessary and unhealthy is that— as long as you're okay with whatever you decided, you're okay, it must be, I'm sure everybody else is fine too. Like, like I'm sure it's good and it might be bigger, you know, and that's really hard.
It wouldn't be the offended spouses shame on them to carry that. But many times I've seen a church say, well, Melissa's okay. So the rest of us should be fine.
Melissa Hogan: It's much easier to do that when the harm is to the spouse and/or the children. So it's much easier to frame it that way, in a case of domestic abuse or alleged domestic abuse, because then, well, they could be okay with it. Well, in actuality, there are reasons that we have laws against abuse and child abuse, because that is a harm to the whole society.
It is also a harm to those people that they may be so trained in it, they may not be able to understand what's happened to them, or to protect themselves or to protect their children. So it is incumbent upon other people to step in, whether or not the woman or the spouse or the children think they're okay, because it is a collective harm and because it's a pattern of behavior.
When we realize that abuse, whether that is sexual abuse to someone outside of a marriage or domestic abuse within the marriage, that person that is abusing has an abusive mindset. When we realize that, then we realize that they're not just harming the person that is the named victim. That mindset plays out in all of their relationships.
In some way, it plays out to people. Maybe they're not harming because they're grooming them or they don't need them for something. But it plays out if even if they're abusing someone outside of their marriage. Let's say, that they've sexually abused someone of equal age or that's under their authority, or they've sexually abused children, minors.
People can say, oh, well, that's the victim, but really there's many different types of victims in that.
Amy Fritz: Yeah. When you say that, I think of an example that is pretty well known, or, you know, people aren't talking about it these days, probably, but I think about Bill Hybels and his assistant coming forward and speaking for an article with the New York times about how he basically assaulted her.
Melissa Hogan: Yeah, I mean, there are probably other victims in the same vein of the primary abuse that we don't know about because it's a pattern. But then there's also these other primary victims and secondary victims.
Let's take the scenario that we have a man in a marriage who has sexually abused one or more people outside the marriage under their authority. And because that person has an abusive mindset, in that marriage the spouse, the woman, has also been groomed in certain ways to believe them, they've been deceived because that person starts by deceiving themselves, the deceit starts there first. The abuser deceives themselves about their behavior, about their need to minimize it to deceive other people in order to achieve it.
They're deceiving themselves and then they're deceiving everybody else in their life. And so that spouse, the woman in that situation, is also very harmed because the psychological damage from having to re-frame your entire relationship with this person and your entire life.
Also, the person has likely used other deceitful strategies like gaslighting. You may question your reality, they might intimidate you or create unhealthy framework so that you don't become suspicious of their behavior, or you don't look at their stuff. So you have learned these unhealthy patterns that maybe you also knew them from childhood as well, and they don't seem abnormal.
But then also the children in that family have taken in that type of behavior as normal. So even so somebody could say, well, those children aren't seeing him sexually abuse someone there. They're not witnesses to this. They try to separate out that person's abusive mindset that exists when they're abusing and when they're covering up their abuse and say, that doesn't affect how they treat their spouse or their children or other people, and it absolutely does. Children have taken in these very subtle, subconscious behaviors that play out in their relationship, and they're either going to think these certain types of behaviors are normal, like deceit, the nervousness of when you kind of cover up something, or you're not telling the truth, or the distance between their parents.
They're taking that as normal. And they're going to carry that through their life, or they're going to learn these other subtle abusive controlling dynamics. And then they're going to learn that that is normal. So they might be victimized in the future. They might learn that controlling people is how you get what you want and what you need, and then to justify that. Or, how do you confuse someone that's suspicious of you?
So absolutely, this mindset and these behaviors play out in the relationship with the non-primary victims if that abuser is abusing outside of the marriage. Now, if he's abusing within the marriage, the wife and children, obviously it's there and it's terrible.
Amy Fritz: Yeah, we just jumped right in to the deep end with this, but I think it's important to have this frame of mind that says this bigger than a one time thing that we know that happened. Generally, when we hear of accounts like this, we hear that this person was discovered because of something they did and it's one thing and we don't put it into context of their life— that what would happen to make somebody willing to do that one thing that we know it generally is part of a pattern of behavior. That is bigger.
I would love to have you speak to the idea that sometimes an outsider would say, that spouse must have known that person was a creep and a terrible person. Why didn't they stop them?
Melissa Hogan: Wow. That that's a heavy question. And the reality is there's several reasons why you wouldn't consciously know.
The first is our training and what is normal for us. So a spouse may have normalized from their childhood into adulthood whatever these types of behaviors are, not necessarily the abusive behaviors, but the ways that it's covered up and the ways that it's ignored, the ways that their partner deceives them or gaslights them that may seem normal. That existed for me. Like patterns of deceit and even the patterns of serial adultery, that was from my family. And I learned that you forgive and you work and restore and forgive means you forget and, you know, all of these things.
So, you don't often see it as a pattern either if we don't learn that abuse is a mindset and that these things are unhealthy. Also, our training in the faith in the church. It's both — there's the training as the wife, that your role is to believe them, to discount bad things that people say about them.
I listened to your most recent podcast and she said, you know, as a wife, you are trained to be super positive about your spouse and you are his PR agent.
Amy Fritz: Yes. You were.
Melissa Hogan: I, I literally used to say, Oh, I'm your biggest fan…
Amy Fritz: Note for the audio: Melissa's raising her hand.
Melissa Hogan: I wanted my spouse to be the best he could be and succeed and be proud of himself and fulfill his potential, not for glory for me, but because I believed in him and loved him and wanted that for him, like you would want it for people you care about.
There's this training in the church and historically as wives to do that. And so we dismiss what seem like minor things and we downplay allegations, because also this person is, all the time reinforcing that this is our marriage and that they love us, even in like, a cycle of domestic abuse in the marriage.
We've talked about this. Abusers don't abuse all the time. There is this intermittent reinforcement that happens and that keeps you in this dynamic because you are getting sometimes this love and attention that you crave from this person and then other times they're a complete, aggressive bully.
So similarly, and even if they're abusing someone outside the marriage, you are getting this intermittent reinforcement that they're this wonderful person that you think they are and sometimes, they're really, really good at it and you're only seeing the mask slip every so often.
It is very easy to attribute that to the exception and that the rule is that they are this wonderful person that you should believe and forgive them for every small slight and we're also trained as women to make our husband the hero. So then if something happens outside the marriage, whether it's abuse or an affair, we want to blame the other woman, right?
I mean, even in clergy sexual abuse for decades. And even now, in some cases, it's framed by the pastor who has has done this. I can think of a certain pastor down in Florida who committed clergy sexual abuse, and it's “an affair.” I'm air quoting. It's “an affair” as opposed to, no, he used his power to manipulate someone into a sexual relationship.
As wives, we want to buy that. We want to believe them and blame the other woman. She tempted them. You know, it was a time of weakness. And then betrayal blindness. You know, Jennifer Freyd, her work in that area, the cost to seeing that they're doing these behaviors, or they're harming someone, or that they're deceiving us, or that they're bullying us.
The cost to that would mean we would have to do something.
Amy Fritz: Yeah.
Melissa Hogan: And especially if you are in a marriage where the church has said you can't get divorced. Unless you have some hard evidence, we will not support you getting divorced or in my case where I swore I would never get divorced because my parents divorce was so damaging.
There's no way out. So your brain tricks you and hides this stuff from you into your subconscious. Jennifer Freyd calls it the “whoosh” in the intro to her book. I just about fell over because I literally experienced it as a whoosh so many times and it was just gone.
Amy Fritz: Her book, “Blind to Betrayal” is so good. I will link that in the show notes. I haven't had the experience of domestic abuse, domestic violence, or somebody like really in my marriage situation or like in my family growing up, but the principles apply to any relationship or community that you're a part of that you really value that your brain says, if you see that, it's going to cost you something that you don't want to pay. I mean, there's not a shame on you that you didn't see it. Your actual brain's working against you. I think that is a good thing to keep in mind when we think. She must have known. He must have known. Why was she protecting him? I don't know that she did.
Melissa Hogan: I mean, it's really interesting. You point out the fact that the dynamics of abuse, or the framework for that is really the same in all types of environments, whether it's domestic abuse, sexual abuse, institutional abuse. If you love your church or your ministry or your self described Christian workplace, you don't want to believe that these things are bad or these things are true. And so your brain doesn't allow you to see it until the weight of evidence sitting on the shelf breaks the shelf. And all of a sudden, it's so many people have described this, It's like, within a day or a couple things over a week, all of a sudden their eyes open.
It's like the scales fall off and you're like, oh, my gosh, this is real.
Amy Fritz: I have a question that I think is a really good one for you to field because of your your own personal experience, as well as your professional expertise and spending a lot of time researching in the field of abuse and learning about the dynamics of tricky, abusive people. I would think this sort of thing happens in this pattern, these situations where the bad actor, someone finds out it's undeniable at this point, and at that point, a decision is made, and sometimes in our Christian bubbles, the decision is made by the bad actor that says, “Oh, I just figured out I have this one problem” and they put a label on it really quickly and you know, whatever that might be. And now I just went to therapy.
We see so many times where people are sent off to like an intensive thing and I would imagine the spouse feels relief, that is what it was, that I have wondered somewhere in my head, something wasn't right. And I bet they even feel relief at that point of like, that's the answer. Tell me about what kind of concerns we should have with that framing of like, now we know, and we're good and we're going, we're moving forward.
Melissa Hogan: Right. I mean, I think as long as you frame it as something other than an abusive mindset, you are in danger of minimizing what has happened, the risk of what will happen in the future and the remedy.
Because if you say it's an affair, Oh, well, gosh, we got the Billy Graham rule and that's how we fix that. We don't let them be alone with women. Or if it's that they touched a child sexually. Well, we don't want to let them be around children and they just need to realize and go to therapy.
But when you realize the Bible talks about everywhere, our actions come out of our heart. And so this is a deep set heart problem when you abuse other people and use them for your own needs. So when we look at it that way, it becomes a little more obvious that this is a pattern of behavior with, there's probably a number of things, and a number of other victims. There's things we don't know about.
There's behaviors we don't know, and they're not telling us the truth. I can't tell you how many times I personally.
Amy Fritz: The entire truth.
Melissa Hogan: Right. But, but especially that's a huge sign when you're having to pull information out and they are only admitting things you already know. Generally you are only finding out a little piece.
I mean, I personally went through a number of experiences over the course of my 21 year marriage where I would find out one thing. And okay, we'll admit that. Is there anything else? No, no, nothing else. And then I'd find out another piece. And it would be like, at the beginning, I probably knew five percent of the reality and and even by the end of that episode or whatever, I still maybe maybe knew 50% and and over the course of my marriage, I think I probably know 10% percent of what is the truth.
I've seen that in a lot of abusive situations where, you're just told a little bit, or they're admitted, they admit a little bit. And that's just a sign that this is not a person who is repenting or changing at all. But even if they do, because it's a mindset, it will take a long time, as in years, decades to change, and you won't know along the course of that if it's actually real, because you are undoing hard wiring in that brain that has existed for a long time, and it's not just like the actual acts of abuse.
Again, it goes deeper into this self deception. And deception of other people. It takes a lot to undo that. And that's with a person who wants to get better. And often abusers, it takes a lot and years for them to even get to that place where they want to actually get better.
Don't believe their words. Do not believe the words.
Only believe actions that literally turn the other direction and run and then being a completely different person over years and decades is how you could say, oh, this person… But a weekend at a retreat center, or
Amy Fritz: Or a week,
Melissa Hogan: A week. Yeah, I think we're both thinking of the same place.
There's a specific retreat place not that far from us where we've seen a laundry list of men in the Christian realm who have had accusations of some kind of abusive behavior. They go to this place and, I'm not saying there's not good work done there, and that there's people who have experienced trauma that are not served there, but in those instances, it appears to be a way to massage the tarnished image of the male Christian leader, because I'm going to this place and getting help. And in fact, I think we know of one person who actually went there and used it to find other victims.
Amy Fritz: Yeah.
Melissa Hogan: People who had experienced trauma.
Amy Fritz: Yeah. I'm thinking of somebody that had like been very public about how they had gone to this place several times. And after saying that on podcasts, you know, there was a big article that came out with victims came naming this person as being sexually abusive. This was after saying they had gone to this place several times. So anytime I hear about somebody, especially if it's a high profile person, that has undeniable allegations against them of something that's really bad, I say to myself, I bet they're going to this place and I bet I'll see them again.
In a month, month and a half, six months, talking about how they went to this place. And my fear is they're just given a lot of really good words to explain away what they did, not that some of those things aren't true that are explaining what happened inside of them, but I think sometimes is used as a bypass of doing deep, ongoing work.
It's a start. But the real proof of transformation cannot be something that happens quickly. As you were talking, Melissa, I was thinking about how the burden might be more appropriately placed, and I don't know if this is the right word, but like, I think the community surrounding the people that are harmed, especially family members who have been harmed by somebody who has made really terrible decisions, that the community around them being aware of the dynamics of what it means to be an abusive person. The friends, the mentors, and faith community leaders in their lives of how important them understanding, because they're not in the same crisis place and they don't have the same betrayal blindness going on for them, that somebody that lives in a house with somebody might have. So tell me a little bit about how what you would say, how how could I be a good friend to somebody who I know whose marriage is in crisis?
What are some good things or what are some things you would advise against?
Melissa Hogan: I gave this some thought. I gave this some thought about the stages that at least I went through and other people that have experienced similar situations go through when you first learn of these situations, or you first open your eyes. And so I think understanding these kind of stages is also how people can come around that person and support them.
First, is understanding that if they are still in close relationship with that person. They are going to be constantly re-traumatized, re-deceived, re-groomed about what is and isn't true, and often it is in their best interest to separate them from that person so that does not happen, because it is really hard to get a handle on anything when you are in that constant cycle.
Now, especially if it's domestic abuse, it's going to be even worse because that's what's been happening, at at a high level anyway, but if they've abused other people, that dynamic, like we said, is still there. So, being in that situation, it's really hard to see what's happening. Talking through that and helping them understand that and trying, even if they're going to stay, how do you support them with the understanding that that's going to happen?
Here, at least for me and from what I've seen in others, are the stages you kind of go through. First, you start to try to understand the dynamic you're in, and then you start to try to figure out how do you care for yourself, and then also if you have children, how do you care for your children?
If the person abused outside the marriage, and then you're reaching the understanding of the marriage, how do you care for your children? Understanding the dynamic of their abuse, if it's different than what occurred with you, and then at some point in there, or overlaying all of this, you are dealing with possibly the enablers of the abuser. So they may muck up this whole thing all along the way.
Backing up, understanding the dynamic you're in is part of that realizing that this is a deceitful person, because again, you want to trust them. You want to believe them. This is your spouse. You are blind to their betrayal because of the cost.
So maybe at this point, as you're waking up, you're counting that cost. But reconciling the fact that this person has been deceiving and they are likely still deceiving you on an ongoing basis is part of understanding the dynamic you're in. And, you know, we hear about wolves in the Bible. We don't think it's going to happen to us.
We don't think we're going to be married to one, The church, I think, also does a terrible job by acting like the wolves are out there. The wolves are the culture. The wolves are the leftists or whoever.
The wolves are in the church. The Bible is very clear about that.
And we also think, well, how did I miss it?
It's easier to think I need to get back to work. I need, especially with the other pressures maybe that this person has brought to bear, it's easier to think I have all these other responsibilities, which you do, and I'm going to kind of not deal with it and not appreciate the gravity or realize that they're deceiving everybody, including me and children and everyone. And just get back to work.
That's part of learning to understand the dynamic you're in. So helping someone, to the extent that they're able and that they can tolerate it in their window of tolerance in the trauma that they're in.
And then it's also, how do you care for yourself?
So, obviously, one of the first steps in therapy is to stabilize someone because often it as you're in that first stage of understanding the dynamic. The trauma is so intense because everything you knew about this person is now under question. You are re-framing your entire relationship with them, your entire dynamic.
The grief is so overwhelming because you're grieving the timeline of, you know, for me, it was timeline of 25 years of this person. I knew that nothing was as I thought it was. You're grieving the future losses of what you thought, you were going to grow old with this person, and now what's this going to look like?
You're grieving who this person is not, who they were not, who they won't be in the future and then, the harm to other people, to your children. Did you ignore red flags? You're wrestling with all of this stuff.
There's a constant cycle as well that you just wish, if this person would just wake up and realize what they did and the harm they cause other people and the harm they caused us, this would all go away.
That makes it even worse when you are around them, and they're acting like they are doing that. And so that gets confusing. So that's also in caring for yourself. You're wrestling with the intertwining doctrines of like the permanency of marriage, forgiveness, and repentance. And you know, what does this look like?
You don't realize you're wrestling with all this, but it's all swirling around and it overwhelms you like waves of grief and then depression. If you were a primary victim yourself, the rates of suicidality are so high because you don't see a good way out. You don't want to get divorced.
This person is abusive. There's this habit of just moving forward because, to the extent that there were signs in the past, you moved forward by minimizing them. Or by whooshing them out. You probably didn't ask for help or tell anybody about any of these signs. And so you have to start to break that pattern and start to be willing to depend on other people and ask for help. And then, you've got to consider that caring for your children and like I said, to the extent we don't understand what abuse is early on, we don't realize the harm that may have come to them, especially if they weren't the primary victims, even if they were the primary victims or one of them.
Understand you're probably not going to understand at the beginning how the depth of the harm and the even the the actions that happened. You're wrestling with, you don't want them to hate that parent, but you also need to protect them and model healthy behavior. And how do you do that?
So that's all before you get to, if your spouse abused somebody outside the marriage. These are all the survival things that are happening before you can even sometimes deal with this, this external abuse and understanding the dynamic of that, because you are in survival mode and you're responsible for your children.
Then, like I said, if the enablers are pressuring you, during this time and are there pressure campaigns to silence you to minimize the behavior? That was something I personally experienced — that that silencing and manipulation and it makes all of this process just eke out so slowly because making sense of it without a good, strong protective, support system is really difficult.
Amy Fritz: Tell me about how your thoughts on the very common response from faith communities to this to say, the first thing you need to do is go to marriage therapy?
Melissa Hogan: That goes back to starting from the foundation that. The problem we have here is an abusive mindset that results in patterns of behaviors.
This is not a marriage problem. This is a abuse problem.
Going to marriage counseling is a remedy for interpersonal communication, responsibility dynamics within a marriage, wholly inapplicable to how you deal with an abusive mindset.
The non abusing spouse definitely should get the support of a trauma informed therapist, and maybe even a support group. I was in pretty much weekly therapy for five years. I was in a DV support group and still am, and it's been six years now. Those two were vital for me.
So a support system helping that person get plugged into those kinds of resources, but marriage counseling, absolutely not. If the issue is serial adultery, if the issue is abuse of any kind, whether domestic abuse or abuse outside the marriage, marriage counseling is not appropriate and not called for.
Amy Fritz: I think that's a good point to make. I also think it can derail the whole process. It slows it down. I mean, if there is a small chance of somebody turning their life around and deciding to do the hard work, it's not going to start in couples counseling. It is going to start on an individual level and they can't do that as long as there's a message being sent that there must be two sides to this.
This idea that if a man strays from his marriage, if that happened, that the wife was not caring for him in a way. That's a terrible, horrible message that we've sent to too many spouses for too long.
Melissa Hogan: I actually have a personal story related to that.
Backing up, I'll say it doesn't serve the abuser well to allow them an out to say that this is someone else's fault versus things I've got to deal with in my mind.
But I will say early on in my marriage, in one of the first series of affairs that I knew about, there were people in our life and, one did say, well, you know, there's two people in a relationship and that stuck with me and that was part of how this just kept perpetuating. Finally, at the end, when it was very, very clear, this was a longstanding pattern, not just the serial adultery, but the interpersonal abuse, a couple different people came to me. I said to them, hey, this is what you said and explicitly and suggested, and that was really harmful to me.
They apologized, and I cannot tell you how meaningful that was because when you are dealing with someone that is pathologically deceitful, and I say pathologically, because it is, it is so a part of their everyday life. It's a pathology, someone that's deceitful in that way.
You're twisting into pretzels to try to support them and meet their needs in in ways that over time, become very, very unhealthy. There's nothing else you could do and that's something you have to learn for yourself that this wasn't me. There was nothing else I could do.
This is a them problem.
That sounds kind of blasé to say it that way, but continuing to remind yourself when you come out of that situation that there was nothing I could have done that could have made this any better.
Amy Fritz: That isn't to say that you are a perfect person. It is to say that somebody, one person is responsible for their own behavior.
Melissa Hogan: Yeah, and I can say that now, especially being in a very healthy relationship, and I know you're in a healthy relationship. It is light years different, the dynamics in a healthy relationship and how things are handled, how you communicate, how you feel safe all the time. It's so different.
Amy Fritz: One of the things I see as a problem and you alluded to this, and I want to talk about it a little bit more. This is something we've seen over and over again. This is not a one time thing. So if someone says, I know what Amy's talking about, I'm going to say, well, I'm talking about 50 of these situations. In the Christian world, the return to position and that being celebrated and it happening relatively quickly. I am concerned. I think one of the reasons for my concern is that there has not been a chance for that person to show that they're a trustworthy person. Oftentimes what they're being returned to is the thing that gives them access to something that was their biggest temptation to do the worst that they could do.
It's like saying, “Oh, I'm so glad you dealt with your alcoholism. Come on back to —
Melissa Hogan: work in a bar.
Amy Fritz: Yes. Tell me about your thoughts on that, especially let's say if you were in the decision making position is somebody that's like, Oh, so and so just finished their therapy, uh, should we bring them back? Is it time? They went to their retreat center. They say they're ready and their spouse says they're ready. Go on.
Melissa Hogan: Here's my opinion, and I'm not going to attribute this to anyone else. Someone who has had power and has abused that power in whatever way, should never have any similar type of power like that, ever. What we know about it is the person who truly changes and repents and appreciates the harm that they have done to people, they would agree. They wouldn't want to be anywhere near that because they understand the harm that they've caused.
I'm going to throw a hypothetical here. Someone who has harmed people in some abusive way. They disappear into obscurity. They make amends to the extent that their victims are able or willing to interact and they make amends where that person is satisfied in, in some way.
Amy Fritz: The amends they're making are defined by the person who'd been harmed.
Melissa Hogan: They're never going, “Well, I did all this. Well, I apologized.” That's a sign they're not repentant. They're not changed.
They don't have a desire to get back into that position, because they are completely humbled and grieved by the things they have done. I feel like the only scenario that I could imagine to put them back into some kind of power is that their victims champion them and they say they are such a changed person. And our relationship has been, it has reconciled and I see them as a completely different person because, again, that's what repentance is, turning the other direction. So it should be obvious. If it's not obvious to the people around us, especially to the victims that the abuser is a completely changed person, that humility and that repentance, I don't believe is there.
Amy Fritz: Mm hmm.
Melissa Hogan: Because when you are so grieved by the harm you've caused, when you appreciate it, you want to make amends to your victims and you are just grieved by it. And when you see people, you often hear about this— with people in prison who are completely grieved and then you hear these wonderful heartwarming stories where they and the family of the person that they murdered or something, that there is this restored relationship. That is a sign of repentance and grief over the harm that you've caused.
But have I seen that by a person in the Christian world or a pastor? No, I haven't.
Amy Fritz: What about the argument about forgiveness? Aren't we called to forgive? Isn't that lacking forgiveness?
Melissa Hogan: I think there have been a lot of warped definitions of forgiveness. And one of the most profound things for me, and I talk about this over on my substack is tearing apart all of these concepts that have been conflated in the church and in ourselves— things like repentance, forgiveness, accountability, relationship, reconciliation, and trust.
We've put all those together that somebody has harmed someone, they say they're sorry, and the relationship should go back to how it was. We should trust them in the exact same way we trusted them before. The sorry is the repentance. And now we're obligated to forgive.
Realizing that all of those things are separate things was so profound to me. Forgiveness is really within us and how we can wrestle with the harm that they've caused and with them as a person.
For me, my standard of whether I have forgiven someone (and often it's a daily choice to forgive, especially in a situation where someone continues to be harmful) is, do I want the best for them? Do I want God's best for them? Would I be open for them coming to me and, and wanting to apologize and to make amends? Would I be vengeful or overly burdensome with what I would need from them? Would I be willing to have these conversations with them? Also, am I able to talk about the things that they've done and the harm that they've caused without extraordinary pain and anger and any emotions like that? I've processed.
It could be very, very harmful, but I can talk about it and I'm not overcome with anger and I could have a conversation with them about it and communicate my forgiveness to them. It can be different for different people, but that's how I look at it and try to evaluate, have I forgiven?
I can't say I'm perfect at it, but that's how I look at it.
Amy Fritz: What would you say to the person that says, that kind of conflates unforgiveness with somebody's desire for justice?
Melissa Hogan: I mean, we have a justice system. I will say our American or earthly justice system is not perfect by any means whatsoever. But it's not like we don't have consequences for actions for murder for rape and we're not saying, well, if that person apologizes and their victim forgives them, they shouldn't go to jail.
No, there are consequences. Accountability is separate from their repentance or our forgiveness. And that is replete in the Bible. There's consequences for sin and God had different consequences for people based on their actions, even if they were sorry and repented. There were still natural consequences for King David, who, when he was confronted by Nathan. Yes, I say we shouldn't believe people's words, but David, he played that out in his life. Again, not a perfect person, but he still had consequences.
His child died and then his other child rebelled against him. And there was harm within his family that was expected to happen. There were consequences for his actions.
Amy Fritz: Shannan Martin says, and she'll say this repeat, “Repeat it with me, say it with me, forgiveness doesn't equal access.”
Melissa Hogan: Yes. And that goes to that trust issue, trust and relationship. Again, separate things. I can forgive people, but I'm not going to trust them because they're not trustworthy and I'm not going to have relationship with them because they're not a safe person. You can argue whether or not that relates to whether they've repented or not, but they've certainly not shown themselves to be trustworthy or shown themselves not to continue to be harmful to people.
That's not a person that I'm going to have, you know, they could be in my periphery. And I think the longer we heal, we realize that we are going to encounter unsafe people and it's part of healing actually to be able to hold that tension and that nuance that not everybody is completely safe and they're still maybe in your life, but they're certainly not in my inner circle or in my secondary circle. Or pretty much in my third circle
Amy Fritz: Yeah. I just thought of a situation that I feel like is applicable to this, something that I experienced in the church that I attended. And I'd love for you to kind of sit in the seat of the decision makers and how to handle this. I went to a church where the youth pastor's wife was found to have been sending, I think some messages of a sexual nature with a, somebody in the youth group under age.
It was turned over to the police. It was handled well in that regard. However, if you are like an elder in that church and trying to figure out how to handle this, how do you handle the thing where you're like, well, what if this is going to cost the spouse, the innocent spouse that didn't do anything by trying to create safety. How do I handle that, Melissa? When I'm afraid that by keeping somebody safe will also harm cost that innocent spouse, the boundaries on the ministry that they're allowed to do.
And I think I see that happening in the whole, you know, Christian world where we're like, but if we don't let this one person back on the stage, the person they're married to is going to be harmed because they're not gonna be able to pay their bills.
Melissa Hogan: There's two things in tension there, right? There's the fact that we have to have standards for how to keep safe, safeguarding, and, that should exist, whether or not someone is married to someone. There is so much of this crossover in the church or in Christian organizations between the person and their spouse. That arguably maybe should not exist. I think Beth Allison Barr's book, “Becoming the Pastor's Wife” is going to be a really interesting read in that regard, because we have these expectations of what a pastor's wife, whether it's a senior pastor or youth pastor, what they should do that we probably should not have.
Amy Fritz: The expectation is that their house is safe? What if the expectation, they're trying not to put the expectation on the person that isn't on the payroll, but they are hiring that person because they have an expectation that the household that they live in is a safe place for them to do ministry. And they find out that maybe that household isn't a safe place for them to, you know, have…
Melissa Hogan: Well, and that, that goes back to the standards of— if that is part of the job requirements. That person probably can no longer meet them. It is terrible that there are impacts to the non-harmful spouse. And, that's true, there were lots in my situation. But, the church's responsibility is to the congregation and to the youth, especially to young people and to the minors.
They can support the non-offending spouse in other ways in terms of helping them consider a different career, a different job. They can transition them out with severance, they can help them. They especially should, as we talked about earlier, help them understand the dynamics of abuse and what it is they're in when they are married to an offending spouse, because, churches should be the most educated on this topic so that we can come alongside people who may not understand and who are in a morass of it, either during the abuse itself or afterwards still.
Amy Fritz: Yeah. And in our church situation, I feel like they told us what happened in a letter and they read it from the stage. I don't know that it was ever addressed ever again. The spouse that had the offending spouse wasn't allowed to be on campus for a certain period of time. But then after that time was up, they just sort of quietly brought her back in.
Melissa Hogan: It also makes you wonder, there's definitely a gender dynamic in abuse that we cannot ignore, in both directions, depending on what's happening. When we look at that, we have to understand our different allowances or different judgements being made based on the offender's gender or the victim's gender, or because it's same sex abuse that people think is somehow different than opposite gender abuse.
I guess I asked that question because I say, if this had been a male youth leader who had done this to a young woman, would they have let him come back? I don't know. I don't know. Some churches absolutely would have.
Amy Fritz: It was not a shining moment. I think a lot of times churches just want to just get over it real fast and are really more upset about media covering it and see that as an attack on them more than they see the issue, the abuse that's happened as the real problem.
That really grieves me that so many times that they're detracting from the real problem by saying, “Oh, look at that. It's the Tennessean and it's that they're just always out to say bad things about us.”
Melissa Hogan: Right. It's a type of silencing. It may not be the overt silencing that happens with non-disclosure agreements or them telling their church don't talk about this. But if we're not being transparent, there is kind of a layer of silencing. We're not giving the information. So then people don't even know what questions to ask.
People feel like they shouldn't talk about it. And so being transparent about situations of abuse and: What is known? What is alleged? Obviously every case is unique, especially if there's victims that that don't want to be identified or, you know, known. You have to take that into consideration.
But, more information with those caveats is better than less information.
Amy Fritz: Yeah. And a healthy organization isn't going to consider you a troublemaker for asking questions. I mean, the stakes are really high in these sorts of situations and the kind of access people have to. People with less power, people who are vulnerable, hat's a red flag when they're like, you talking about it, is the problem. Yeah. You are not the problem.
Melissa Hogan: Yeah. Well, and that's why. Asking the questions ahead of time and understanding safeguarding policies and having those frank conversations before there's a situation where something has happened and then you're dealing with it at that point. Then you can understand, are they following even the policies that they have put out there? Are they willing to talk about it? And what should I expect?
Amy Fritz: But we don't know what to ask sometimes if we've never gone through a situation like this. So it's not, there's no shame if you don't know the questions to ask. And I'd also say every organization is gonna say, “Of course, we're safe. Thanks for asking, Amy. We do MinistrySafe. We do background checks. We're good.”
It's going to take probably a little deeper conversation, a little more awkward conversation if you really care to know the nitty gritty of how things are handled. And you might feel like you're a problem. I feel like I'm a problem sometimes.
I just have to ask it one more way, because I have seen people skirt a question because I use the wrong term about NDAs, where I say, now I'm going to ask and say, do you have any documents or any agreements you require anybody to agree to in order to work there or
Melissa Hogan: You feel like you got to be a lawyer…
Amy Fritz: That keeps them from speaking freely about their experience, right? Like, should I say that exactly right? Because I've asked about like, do you do NDAs? And pastors have said, no, we don't. And then I find out, oh, they do a confidentiality agreement. It's just word-smithing. I'm not saying everybody does that purposefully to skirt it. I'm just saying people that want their place to be safe, don't know how to make them safe and they think they are. Because they did what their insurance company required to have insurance.
Melissa Hogan: I would say, too, especially in cases of sexual abuse, by the time they're actually arrested or they have something that would be on their record for a background check, often they have a myriad of victims or they're not caught for a long time. So we do hear about cases in churches where they didn't check and this person was a known or registered sex offender.
Obviously, that's some cases. There's a ton of cases where this is the first offense. Whether that's, you know, power abuse, sexual abuse, spiritual abuse. So, yes, you have the policies, have safeguarding policies, have background checks. All of these things also need to have a full understanding of abuse, because there's going to be abusive people, I guarantee, in almost every church's timeline, that have never been arrested and would pass a background check with flying colors and half of the people they knew would say they're wonderful, amazing people.
Amy Fritz: As you were saying that I was also thinking about, often when there's abuse that happens, inside of that is whether it impacts somebody who is a member of a church, whether they are a leader or not, whether on payroll or volunteer, or they're just an attender, the statement you hear from the church, if you hear anything is, “Don't worry, folks. It wasn't anybody in our church, what we heard about was outside of the church.”
I would urge people when they hear that is to say, you just cannot prove a negative. And just because the thing they heard about was outside of the church, it may not mean you should not assume that person never harmed anybody inside of the church.
You have some work to do possibly to make sure you're doing your best to care for the people in your church.
Melissa Hogan: And the first thing we should feel is incredible grief for whoever that was, whoever was affected that way. It doesn't matter if they went to our church. Grieving with those who grieve and have been harmed and being responsible in some way for that person who did that harm.
But also you're right. Again, this goes back to — abuse is a mindset. People were impacted by that person, even if the primary victim that we currently know about is outside the church. So people were groomed to believe that person. They were deceived by that person. The likelihood that they may also have victims within the church is entirely possible. There's obviously, secondary impacts within their family and friends and things like that.
Amy Fritz: Where would you point people to that say, okay, I want to handle this well. Where can they learn, who can they learn from?
Melissa Hogan: If they want to handle it well, they should learn about abuse and put into place policies. There are a number of different organizations that can do that. GRACE or Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment has a safeguarding program that can come in and assist with that again. Full disclosure: I assist with investigations that GRACE does, independent investigations.
There's also resources. Dr. Diane Langberg is also a great resource on understanding abuse. The Caring Well Conference and materials are online from the Southern Baptist Convention. I think the key is, becoming educated yourself and looking at different resources, , that can, can really give you a wide understanding of all the different types of abuse.
Amy Fritz: Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Thanks for stopping by the podcast, Melissa.
Melissa Hogan: Thanks. Always good to talk.
Amy Fritz: I can't wait to have you back. I already have plans for our next conversation. I think it has to do with the talk you're going to give soon, but I'm gonna let you give your talk soon first, and then I will talk a little bit more, flesh it out a little more on the podcast in a couple months.
It's great talking to you.
Melissa Hogan: You too.
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Warmly,
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