Thread by @ShannonDingle

I was 23, married a year, pregnant with our first child. I was being trained to lead a small group of middle schoolers at the church summer camp.

So was he.

He is low serving time, one of the men named in @HoustonChron database, for what he did to boys. houstonchronicle.com/news/investiga…

I didn’t know. I didn’t think any of us had known. I trusted the church version of facts.

I was never told that my small group of girls included one who had been in his Sunday school class. No one ever checked on her or talked to her about what happened because she was a girl.

She was a bit belligerent that summer.

She had good reason to be.

(She’s a dear friend now that we’re both adults, and I love her feistiness now as much as I was confused by it then.)

Someone now known for her advocacy was there too. Dee didn’t blog or tweet back then.

Then that summer happened. Then she found out about another boy’s report, a year earlier. Then she found lies upon lies.

You may know Dee from @wartwatch now, but it all started that summer.

Here’s how Lise tells the story:
thewartburgwatch.com/2017/08/28/a-s…

She left that church, left church altogether for years. I stayed. I still didn’t know the full story.

(Side note: I don’t agree with the disclaimer on this. I think too many leaders from then are still at the church now.)

It wasn’t until my family left for other reasons - a collective mix of our membership’s whiteness, resistance to full disability inclusion, & treatment of women - that Lise trusted me, not just with her story but with receipts.

I trust Lise, but I have documents to back it up.

Around the same time, I wrote a blog post I expected no one to read, one about being pro-life & planning to vote Democrat in 2016.

I had only left that church a couple months before, but it was amicable. After my post went viral, that church - with few exceptions - left me.

I don’t share that to call myself a victim here. I just want to offer the full context. I just want to point out that the evangelical/exvangelical reckoning that 2016 saw wasn’t just about an election.

For many of us, the foundation had already been crumbling.

In my blog post, I not only challenged political views re:life but also revealed another reason we left that Southern Baptist church: LGBTQ people’s dehumanization.

I was pictured as staff on the church website. I was strongly opposed to HB2. I couldn’t be both, not publicly.

This political diversion might seem like a detour from the Houston Chronicle piece, but I don’t think it is.

Our response to sexual assault is a pro-life issue, if we value the lives of victims and survivors.

Before my pro-life piece made a splash online, another piece of mine did.

I had left our Southern Baptist church that week. I wrote this anonymously. I didn’t think most of my Southern Baptist friends would care about real people as much as HB2 politics.
rageagainsttheminivan.com/2016/05/what-i…

I know some people who love their theology more than humanity, their politics more than people... & their independence as a local church more than a registry that could hold sexual abusers accountable.

It’s all connected. It’s all entangled. None of the issues are really siloed.

In the @HoustonChron piece, @Wade_Burleson is quoted saying, “There's a known problem, but it's too messy to deal with. It's not that we can't do it as much as we don't want to do it. ... To me, that's a problem. You must want to do it, to do it.”

houstonchronicle.com/news/investiga…

When I wrote my HB2 piece, @rachelheldevans shared it. We didn’t know each other then.

Some people were so angry with RHE’s theology that they didn’t want to consider anything she shared. They were more angry at RHE (and LGBTQ people) than sexual assault. rageagainsttheminivan.com/2016/05/what-i…

As I was leaving our SBCchurch, HB2 supporters twisted sexual assault against children into a weapon against the trans community.

The SBC had been resisting a directory of sexual abusers then. I didn’t know that. I simply knew they treated sex abuse like a political red herring.

I knew, two days before I resigned from my SBC church’s role of disability inclusion coordinator, that I couldn’t say what I wanted to say about sex abuse being used as a political red herring.

They were more mad at trans people than actual sexual abuse.

That day - two days before I resigned - I was at a fundraising event, where @JenHatmaker and I met. We talked and cried about it all.

I didn’t share about that as I left because they were more mad at Jen’s affirmation of LGBTQ identity than they were at sexual abuse.

It shouldn’t have surprised me when many of my old SBC friends were more mad at my support for Hillary than about sexual abuse.

They were more angry with my politics than they were about sexual assault, even as Trump had a record of sexual assault (including in his own words).

It shouldn’t have surprised me when many rejected #churchtoo because two queer women - @emilyjoypoetry and @hannahpaasch - started it.

They were more angry at Emily Joy and Hannah for being queer than they were at #churchtoo stories calling attention to sex abuse in the church.

People Lise and Dee and I loved - ones we worshiped with, prayed with, ate with, cried with, spent every week with - have been furious when we’ve spoken or written about what happened at our church.

They were more angry with us than at what happened.

I am grieved by what Doug Goodrich did at my old church more than a decade ago, but I am more deeply grieved that so little has changed since then.

Nothing will change until they’re as mad about sexual abuse as they are at people and politics who threaten SBC power. /end