The Cause

Nothing fun about this Friday, sorry

Trigger warning: This post discusses sexual abuse, including of children.

I’m sure you’ve seen the explosive New York Times story detailing Cesar Chavez’s abuse of women and girls, including another celebrated leader in his movement, Delores Huerta. (That’s a gift link)

There’s no need to go into the details here, except to offer a word about Huerta. She is 96 years old and has revealed for the first time that he raped her, presumably in response to the other women coming forward. Her own legacy is deeply connected with Chavez’s. She married his brother, with whom she has several children. She had two children as a result of Chavez’s assaults. She hid the pregnancies and gave the children to other families to raise, although she subsequently developed relationships with them. She says she didn’t know he was also abusing children, and she is “sickened” to discover this.

She could have easily stayed silent at this point. Or she could have challenged the women’s accounts. But instead she told the truth. Not just about Chavez, but about the reasons why she didn’t speak up before.

I carried this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work. The formation of a union was the only vehicle to accomplish and secure those rights and I wasn’t going to let Cesar or anyone else get in the way. I channeled everything I had into advocating on behalf of millions of farmworkers and others who were suffering and deserved equal rights.

Chavez has been dead for over 30 years. There are schools and roads and libraries named for him. There are museums and festivals and holidays celebrating his legacy as a champion of farm workers and the rights of Latinos in America more broadly.

He spent his public life advocating for the rights of others. While in private he grossly violated others’ rights and personhood. Their very bodies.

Such hypocrisy is sadly all too common among human beings. Especially when there’s a larger cause on the line. Huerta may not have known about Chavez’s abuse of girls. But you can bet that many, many, many people did. And they all stayed silent because they didn’t want to harm The Cause. They believed Chavez was too essential to it. They believed it was worth sacrificing a few children to advance a movement.

The Chavez story hits close to home for the kids of missionaries, and I’m sure some of my fellow MKs, especially those who suffered similar abuse by “heroes of the faith,” are reeling today.

But even those who didn’t suffer this kind of abuse grew up under the shadow of The Cause. Some suffered real harm—early boarding school, other forms of neglect, being put in dangerous situations, enduring war and witnessing violence.

Many more simply felt deprioritized by the people meant to love them more than anyone else. People who seemed to love their notion of God and their version of The Cause more.

It’s a rotten trade every time when you harm people while trying save people. When you put your cause over your character. When you put righteousness over relationship. You’re robbing Peter to pay Paul. You’re mopping the floor wearing muddy boots. You’re living a disintegrated life. You’re grossly missing the point.

Don’t get me wrong, there are hard decisions when it comes to the hard work of change. Policymaking in particular is an impossible task. The art of bringing the most benefit to the most people will always leave some people out.

But activism, charity, and ministry is less complicated. And far more self-righteous. If advancing your cause, whether secular or religious, necessitates abuse, especially of children, it can’t possibly succeed. Not wholly. Not really. Not in the long run.

What is The Cause if not loving others? There is no other cause.

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I’ve seen a few more conservative types commenting on the Chavez story with something akin to, “See, abuse happens in liberal circles, too.” And that’s true, it can, and it does.

But this kind of statement is also misleading. Because whether you’re talking about Cesar Chavez or Joseph Duggar—that’s right, a second Duggar son has been arrested for the sexual abuse of children—it’s all the same thing.

It’s patriarchy. It’s the abuse of power. It’s some people being assigned a lesser value than other people.

It can happen anywhere, and it does. But these days, as opposed to Cesar Chavez’s days, when women’s rights lagged behind other civil rights advances, there’s a lot more of it in conservative religious settings that intentionally elevate men above women, use harsh parenting to teaching children to unquestioningly obey authority, and restrict women’s roles. I’ve recommended the work of D.L. Mayfield and Krispin Mayfield to you before on the nexus of evangelical parenting and abuse.

But in fact, in any kind of setting, cultivating homogenous leadership structures alone encourages abuse. According to political scientists like Brian Klaas, these environments discourage accountability. And the lack of accountability fosters abuse.

For my book, I spoke to scholar Marie Griffith, who studies sexual abuse in religious settings. She is working on a comparative analysis of the Catholic and Southern Baptist abuse crises. There are many differences between the two cultures, but the obvious similarity is the exclusion of women from leadership. She told me denominations that include women in leadership have less abuse. It’s kind of an obvious point, but she’s accumulating the data to prove it.

But another key element in evangelicalism’s abuse problem (and I assume the Catholic one, although I am not very knowledgable on Catholicism) is the importance of The Cause. White evangelicals have long believed they are specially tasked with a mission from God to save humanity from hell and redeem the culture. Implied in that is that they are better than the culture—more righteous, more correct, more wise—and that their ways are the best ways.

Despite pithy evangelical sayings like, “We’re not perfect, just forgiven!” or a theology of us all sinners, there’s an inherent arrogance in evangelicals’ exclusive claims not simply to God, but to Christianity itself. We have finally nailed Christ’s teachings, we know how to be saved, we correctly interpret the Bible, we know how to live, our lives are more successful.

But what if they’re not? Like pretty obviously? When you’ve staked not just your life, but your afterlife on such claims, what happens when they turn out to be false? When you fail at the most basic task of loving others?

It takes a lot of work—a lot of denial, a lot of dissonance, a lot of deflection and decoration and diversion—to live in a house of cards. Communal arrogance is a powerful antidote to accountability.

Incidentally, while abject patriarchy remains far more common in conservative Christianity than in secular liberalism, cause-worship remains a problem in all kids of settings.

Just for one thing—Bill Clinton is still invited to things. His abuse of women, including a credible rape, is well documented by unbiased sources. Feminists at the time excused his behavior because he was a champion of their issues.

Or Jeffrey Epstein—although there wasn’t even a cause involved there, just greed for money and power, some of the scientists and philanthropists in his network probably justified their association along these lines. Harvey Weinstein funded Democratic campaigns and liberal causes and “made great art.” Bill Richardson and George Mitchell were great diplomats. Deshawn Watson was a great quarterback.¹

Even getting beyond such horrific sorts of abuse, we’ve all known leaders who are verbally abusive, unkind, entitled, awful people. But if they do good work, if they benefit the organization, if they are talented enough, if they advance The Cause—it’s all good. Just put up with it.

We want our team to win. We want our organization to thrive. We want our cause to succeed. We tell ourselves it’s better for everyone that it does.

Human beings of all kinds are capable of terrible things. We really are all sinners. But the vast majority of us also respond to incentives. And when the mistreatment of others isn’t tolerated, it really does tend to decrease. And when it’s allowed to continue, it really does tend to increase. It’s not rocket science.

And ultimately, we’re all enlisted in The Cause of all Causes, to ensure that each human being is treated as a child of God with equal value.

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I had a lovely week away with Kevin, seeing the sites of the Sea Island low country. Thank you for giving me Monday off, I’m sure you all were just devastated not to get a post.

A few things to pass on:

• I will be in Grand Rapids April 17-19 for Calvin University’s Faith and Writing conference. If you live there and would like me to speak somewhere with at least a dozen or so people, let me know.

• I will be in Atlanta, briefly, for the Religion News Service conference April 23-24, not sure I’ll have time to speak, but let me know if you have an idea.

• I will be in Chicago even more briefly for another joint film screening-book discussion with Ari Ali on April 25. Come see us!

• Lastly, I will be in Charlottesville, VA speaking at the Pulaski Institute’s For Good Conference May 8-9, with the likes of Jamelle Bouie, Alan Elrod, Sarah Posner, Allyson Shortle, and more! It’s FREE, so come see us.

Incidentally, at this point, I am mainly trying to get my name out and about and build my skills and resume as a public speaker. So if you would like me to come see you and think you can round up a decent number of folks, let me know, I’ll see if we can work something out. I do not charge money as of now, although I will gladly accept donations.

No reading recs this week, I’ve been too slammed! Sorry.

Grace and peace, friends. Go well. Godspeed.

1. His flame-out, after the stupid owners of the Cleveland Browns threw MY SON Baker Mayfield overboard and shelled out a ka-jillion dollars to acquire Watson, is intensely gratifying.