For Our Daughters

Note: If you have concerns about a situation of abuse, call the CRC’s Safe Church Ministry, now part of Thrive: 1-877-272-6206. From the website: “We continue to equip congregations in abuse awareness, prevention, and response. We help build communities where the value of each person is honored; where people are free to worship and grow free from abuse; and where abuse has occurred, the response is compassion and justice that foster healing.”

Author Leslie Leyland Fields once said, “It’s not the person who does the thing that gets in trouble, it’s the person who talks about the thing.”

Fields, the author of Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers, who writes about her father’s sexual abuse within her family, would relate to the women featured in this potent, half-hour documentary.

Produced by historian and Calvin University professor Kristen Kobes Du Mez and directed by Carl Byker, For Our Daughters was inspired by the final chapter of Du Mez’s bestselling book, Jesus and John Wayne. The film relates the stories of several high-profile cases in which evangelical women were diminished, sidelined, silenced, and in most cases, sexually abused or assaulted by their pastors.

Rachael Den Hollander, a former gymnast who made national headlines by speaking out about the widespread abuses of Larry Nassar, is also featured in the film. “When you’ve created a culture where manhood and womanhood is defined by submission and authority, you have created a culture where authority becomes abuse,” she says. Her book title—What Is a Girl Worth? One Woman’s Courageous Battle to Protect the Innocent and Stop a Predator—No Matter the Cost—describes the impetus behind this film. The women who tell their stories here are not out to damage anyone’s faith or get revenge on their abusers. They want to bring their stories out of the shadows and into the light, where healing begins and other women and girls may be informed and protected from harm.

The cost of telling their stories has been high. Jules Woodson describes how her youth pastor, Andy Savage, drove her home from a church event years ago but made a detour to a dark road, where he sexually abused her and swore her to secrecy.

In 2017, as a grown woman, she wrote him an email. “I remember” what happened, it read in part.

Within two days, the Tennessee megachurch where Savage worked jumped into damage-control mode. From an impressive and well-lit stage, Savage called his abuse a “sexual incident with a teenage girl,” and his emotional confession gained him a standing ovation. The church released a statement saying that Woodson was unfortunately not on the same path of healing as Savage, which in effect blamed her for not getting over it faster. The church leadership’s rush to comfort and even exalt her abuser retraumatized Woodson.

As the multiple harrowing stories of sexual abuse and assault and then the inevitable cover-ups unspool, Leyland Fields’ theory seems confirmed: Each of these women was attacked, maligned, or punished in some way for speaking out about her traumas.

There will no doubt be disputes about the connections the filmmakers make here to Christian Nationalism and the MAGA wing of the Republican party, but overall, the film focuses on abuse and subsequent cover-ups in church settings for the purpose of helping “our daughters,” whether biological, adopted, or spiritual, so they can be safe from grave harm.

Most of the stories in the film take place in Southern Baptist or similar churches, not the CRC. But it behooves all Christian women to watch and learn from their siblings in Christ, to examine and be aware of the kinds of systems and theologies that seek to dominate and silence women.

Pastor Len Vander Zee, a retired CRC minister, adds another kind of male, Christian voice. Juxtaposed with the bombast and vitriol of some of the other pastors seen in the film, VanderZee gently points out that “power corrupts, it always corrupts,” and “macho power is not what Jesus calls for.”

The film ends on a note of hope and love. “We are not calling for a departure from Christ, but rather a return to who Christ really is,” says Den Hollander. (YouTube, Forourdaughtersfilm.com)