Disobedient Women

 Disobedient Women: How a Small Group of Faithful Women Exposed Abuse, Brought Down Powerful
Pastors and Ignited an Evangelical Reckoning, by Sarah Stankorb

I've been paying quite a lot of attention to the evangelical world for the last year or so, so this title naturally caught my attention.  Stankorb, a journalist, grew up on the edges of this world, and chronicles the efforts of many people over a long time to bring attention to problems of ecclesiastical abuse.  Evangelicals, in their efforts to build parallel institutions that would allow Christian families to live largely in bubbles insulated from the dangerous outside world, didn't really build in any safeguards -- after all, this was supposed to be their safe space.  Since every institution (schools, businesses, churches, Little League teams, whatever) is vulnerable to predators who seek to use it for access to victims, safeguards are always important.  And in these parallel institutions, children were taught to always obey their leaders unquestioningly, and girls were taught to do whatever a man in charge told them to do.  It was a perfect recipe for abuse.

Stankorb starts off explaining the Quiverfull and Gothard movements, which are probably the most famous.  (The Duggars are part of the Gothard movement, though this book does not focus on them.)  She moves on to spend the largest section of the book focused on the Southern Baptist Convention, and winds up with Doug Wilson and his church in Idaho, which is small but has an extremely wide influence.  Throughout, she brings out particular cases, the efforts victims made at the time, and the eventual rise of blogging and online networking that brought people together to work on bringing sunshine into dark places.  The #ChurchToo hashtag finally got the attention of mainstream journalism, but there's a long way to go.

Since I was homeschooling, and reading about the homeschooling world, from about 2003 on, I remember quite a few of these players.  I was totally unfamiliar with this world and so I did what I always do - I read absolutely everything.  Besides my own homeschooling guru, Susan Wise Bauer, I read John Holt and radical unschoolers.  I read Catholic stuff.  I read history and learned about Rushdoony.  I was reading the No Longer Quivering blog she starts out with when it was being posted.  I read Doug Wilson.  I thought Wilson was obviously a fringe maniac, and I'm appalled now to see how much influence and popularity he has garnered. (My main memory of his book is an anecdote that he thought adorable, about how his father-in-law called newborn babies "little bundles of sin.")  Stankorb mentions a lot of the people I was reading about 20 years ago, and describes them accurately.

The title implies that the book is entirely about women and girls as abuse survivors, and that is not actually the case.  I think she's referring to the fact that this particular anti-abuse movement is largely, though not entirely, led by women.  But she does refer throughout to male victims and activists too.  One thing I wish she'd been a little clearer about (for those of us not already familiar with this world) is the camp abuses.  Or maybe I was just reading too fast.  But I don't think she names Kanakuk, though she does talk about something that sounds a lot like it, involving a lot of boys.  While the text is extensively footnoted, it could use an index too.

An excellent read, highly recommended for those interested in the topic.