Opinion: Sexual assault and why I left the Episcopal Church

Ed: The following opinion piece was sent to us by a reader.

My name is Shelley (a pseudonym), and I’d like to share with you my reasons for leaving the Episcopal Church.

First, a little about me.

For starters, on the surface, you might think I’m the least likely person out there to leave the church. Several family members have been prominent Episcopal/Anglican/Church of England bishops. One of my great-grandfathers was a prolific hymnwriter, and many of his works are staples in the denomination — the kind of schmaltzy Victorian hymns that everyone loves and gets trotted out for the big holy days.

My politics are liberal and inclusive. I support reproductive freedom, universal healthcare, and same-sex marriage. Indeed, my same-sex wife and I were married in the church by my father, who is an Anglican (not ACNA-type) priest, amidst a riot of Anglo-Catholic splendor and astonishingly large crowds.

Professionally, I’m a well-known attorney in a major city, the founding partner of my law firm, and very active in Democratic politics, including having served as very senior official under a former Democratic president.

Growing up, I was passionate about the church and served in every role imaginable. Indeed, everyone I knew thought I’d eventually become a priest.

And why not? As the church has become more inclusive over time, its values have come into closer alignment with my own. Plus, I love God and serving others, and as an adult have served in every leadership role imaginable in the church.

I’ve also been more than generous with the church, donating both professional services and hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years. 

Cognitive dissonance

But over time, a strange cognitive dissonance has taken hold of me. At first, I thought it was minor depression or being overly tired. Or maybe too many unduly long vestry meetings over world-changing topics like whether to paint the church hallway in white or beige.

However, I had an epiphany, but in the worst possible way.

The rector of my parish, who had counseled my wife and me in the middle of a turbulent point in our marriage, sexually assaulted me.

To be clear, this was not a case of unwanted touching. Nor was it verbal. It was an unabashed physical attempt to rape me.

Fortunately, despite my small size, I was able to fend him off, although I was bruised and sore for many weeks afterwards.

Far worse is the psychological trauma. Indeed, I still have flashbacks to the incident: The powerful smell of alcohol on his breath, the scent of cheap deodorant, the sudden shock and tsunami of initial incomprehension and fear that came over me, the outrage that he would do this in the church itself.

And later, when I got home, the unrelenting fear and trauma that came from having my world turned upside down, along with profound embarrassment.

Days later, I reported the matter to a Title IV intake officer. She seemed caring and respectful, and dutifully took notes.

And then, silence. For more than a year.

With each passing day, I questioned myself. Did I do the right thing? Did I somehow give off the wrong vibes to my assailant? Did people believe me?

Even worse, my follow-ups to the intake officer went unanswered.

As luck would have it, I ran into my bishop at, of all things, a supermarket, looking decidedly un-bishop-like in sweats and a hoodie.

“What’s going on with my complaint?” I asked.

Looking profoundly uncomfortable, he responded, “I’ll look into it and get back to you.”

To be clear: Anyone who looks at you like that knows the answer, and it’s not good. In other words, there’s no “looking into it” required.

But I put aside my doubts and waited anxiously for a phone call, email, or other communication.

Four days later, a letter came from the bishop. Opaque, formal, terse, he informed me that “the matter had been addressed,” but that details were confidential.

What? How can that be? I’m the person with PTSD, and I don’t even get the courtesy of knowing what happened? Or any care or concern?

After a lot of back-and-forth, none of which involved meaningful communication from the diocese, I filed an appeal requesting reconsideration. Specifically, I was hoping for help in healing from the attempted rape. I was also concerned that, while the perpetrator appeared to have taken an abrupt sabbatical a few weeks after my complaint, he was back at what was now my former parish, with no sign of any guardrails or restrictions on his behavior.

The response?

Apparently, despite not even being told of an outcome, I was past the 30-day appeal period for a Title IV complaint, so the whole thing was a done deal. And while the diocese’s communications were far from clear, they seemed to suggest that the matter had been “resolved” via a secret accord between the bishop and the respondent, which is not appealable under Title IV.

My grief and anger rose inside me, like a tsunami built on a seismic betrayal. As a result, my CPTSD became overwhelming, and I attempted suicide, ending up in an inpatient mental health unit for 10 days.

Things get better. Things get worse.

Over time, with a lot of love from my wife, with whom I’d reconciled, a supportive family, and excellent but expensive mental health care, I got better.

But every step forward came with another step backwards. Indeed, over time, I became friends with several women who had shockingly similar experiences with my former priest. Tellingly, each was, at the time of the assault, in a same-sex relationship that was facing challenges.

Even worse, evidence strongly suggested that the priest in question was still assaulting other women. Yet in every instance, when someone said something to the church, it hid behind a veil of silence.

When I contacted the police, they were actually very supportive, but, absent DNA or other evidence, they concluded that any effort to prosecute the offender would go nowhere, and that any effort to do so would only further traumatize victims — although no one ever asked me how I would feel about such an effort.

Yet despite these challenges, throughout the period following my sexual assault, I remained active in another nearby Episcopal parish. The priest, a woman, was wonderful and supportive, and appeared to have quietly lobbied the bishop to address the matter, but to no avail.

But even as I sorted through the wreckage of my spiritual life, I became increasingly uneasy.

At first, I couldn’t put my finger on it. Lots of micro-aggressions, pointed looks, averted gazes. Nothing specific or major, just an awkward feeling of being an outsider, looking in. Similarly, at standing committee meetings where I’d previously served and received positive feedback, a pointedly icy silence descended whenever I entered the room.

But over time, things ramped up, and I became aware that women in the altar guild and choir were gossiping about me, claiming that I was trying to ruin my former priest’s career and his marriage. Indeed, I was apparently a hot topic at the annual clergy retreat, where, at happy hour, I was repeatedly excoriated for “causing problems.”

Other rumors were equally ludicrous, including that I had prior criminal convictions, that I was mentally ill (the latter was true, but only after the rape attempt), and that I was a “domestic terrorist.”

Wait, I thought. As a prominent and well-respected attorney, involved in my community, with a wife and kids at home, how could I be a “domestic terrorist?” Wasn’t that a label for people who were plotting criminal acts? How could I be a “domestic terrorist” when my last brush with the law was a speeding ticket at age 17? Not to mention my perfect credit score.

I hired a private investigator to get to the bottom of things, and soon learned that the source of these rumors was my former priest. No surprise there, although his efforts clearly fell on fertile soil, given the cliquish behavior of women (and some men) in my parish.

Through therapy, I also discovered that his efforts to trash me followed a pattern that is common with malevolent narcissists. In every instance, he never came right out and defamed me. Instead, it was a game of endless innuendo and reverse shuttle diplomacy.

For example, he told his wife, “Parishioners think Shelley is dangerous and threatening.” Meanwhile, he’d tell parishioners, “My wife knows Shelley well, and is terrified of her.”

And around and around.

Meanwhile, a friend of mine, also an attorney, with close ties to the local police department, gave me a heads-up that my former priest had contacted the police repeatedly, falsely claiming I was a “domestic terrorist,” and had threatened him.

So, I filed a request under my state’s open records law to try to learn more. In almost every instance, my requests were denied under the guise of an “active investigation,” even though no such investigation was underway.

That said, I did obtain enough information from call logs and other second-tier sources to confirm my fears that my former priest was hard at it, trying on every front to discredit and smear me. And some of what he told the police — including that I had emailed him death threats- was facially false, as I have never emailed him, even about parish business.

My response

As an attorney, you’d think I was uniquely situated to address these problems. But the reality was far different.

In every instance, fellow attorneys told me that attempting to sue for defamation would be difficult, since many of the defamatory claims were couched as opinions. Moreover, even today, courts are deferential towards clergy and reluctant to become embroiled in what they see as internal church disputes.

Similarly, my bishop repeatedly stated that he didn’t want to get involved. But isn’t that what a bishop is for? To provide some measure of adult supervision?

In short, I have reams of documentation, but to no avail.

Meanwhile, my former priest operates in a liminal space — just beyond the reach of a defamation lawsuit, impervious to complaints about making false police reports, and virtually unsupervised by his bishop. Yet in that space he causes lasting harm to my spiritual and emotional well-being.

Meanwhile, I see the dirty underbelly of the church

As if all of this weren’t enough, over time, I became increasingly aware of just how ugly the Episcopal Church can be.

Having grown up in a close, loving parish, I entered this situation with a sunny, yet naive, view of the church.

However, this slowly unraveled as I realized that, far from being a beloved community, my parish and diocese were a viper’s nest of gossip, mean-girl games, power plays, and other silliness straight out of junior high school. All of this compounded by a decidedly amateur-hour approach to issues like cash management, financial management, and facility maintenance.

Yet many didn’t see this, as this toxic miasma was hidden behind a veneer of virtue-signalling, inevitably including “safe issues,” like repenting from the church’s role in slavery.

To be clear: We absolutely need to repent of our role in slavery. But in the meantime, a little integrity in the here and now would be nice.

Another discovery: I am not alone. Far from it.

Everyone seems to think that it’s only conservatives who have left the church. But as I have shared my experiences, I’ve discovered countless other people — progressive Christians, like myself — who’ve fled the church after facing abuse of every sort.

Speaking of abuse, I’ve also come to realize that the Episcopal Church truly is stuck in a time warp. Have an affair as a priest, and your bishop will suspend you or defrock you in record time. That is, if she deals with the issue at all.

But engage in criminal activity, like filing false police reports or engaging in sexual assault, and the response is a big yawn.

Indeed, a dear friend of mine, a priest, was shocked to overhear diocesan staff talking about my case in a public setting, saying that my situation was almost certainly imaginary, and even if it wasn’t, I almost certainly egged him on. That’s lunacy, as I have zero sexual interest in men, and even less so in the case of this glib, self-absorbed narcissistic asshole whose main claim to fame is that he was a college athlete. (And a drunken, misogynistic frat boy, according to peers.)

My message to the church

As someone whose family has been Anglican since the English Reformation, I feel well-suited to assess the state of the church. That said, absent wholesale reform, the Episcopal Church is dying, and quickly.

So what’s the solution?

For starters, the church’s culture needs to change. Yes, Michael Curry talked incessantly about the “Way of Love,” but you’d be hard-pressed to see this in the life of the church. Indeed, while there are pockets of compassion and integrity within the denomination, laity and clergy alike rarely consider love an essential part of the church.

Second, despite what the hymn says, the church’s one foundation is not Jesus Christ the Lord. Instead, it’s built on committees, reports, meetings, and paperwork, all of which serve to minimize urgency and accountability. From top to bottom, the church must recognize and address these issues.

Third, the very basis of the Episcopal Church, which is the episcopacy, needs to change. The days are long gone when people are okay with canons and policies that say one thing, yet bishops do the exact opposite. The church needs to act as one organization, and that starts with Sean Rowe, Barbara Kempf, and the House of Bishops following church policy. If that’s not possible, then the canons and other church policies need to change to be truthful.

And to be clear: When the canons say one thing, but the church does something entirely different, that is a lie. A church that lies to its members will, in the not distant future, have no members.

Fourth, church canons need to be changed to address lay misconduct. When I say that, I don’t mean people should be tossed out willy-nilly. Indeed, excommunication should be exceedingly rare. But the reality is that members who, for example, engage in criminal conduct towards others need to be held accountable. And there is plenty of lay misconduct to go around.

Relatedly, far too many bishops claim to have no authority over laity. However, this is a self-serving bit of wordplay. Indeed, while the canons give bishops no official jurisdiction over the laity, in practice, they hold moral authority. There is nothing wrong with a bishop meeting with a parish to say, “You need to knock it off and treat each other with respect.”

Fifth, Title IV is a mess and must be reformed. In my experience, Title IV only made things worse and added to my trauma. The utter disrespect my family and I experienced is, at this point, a situation beyond repair. Even at its best, the entire process was nothing more than badly done theater and impression management.

In this regard, the Title IV intake process should be outsourced to an independent law firm or organization. As it stands, I’ve encountered literally hundreds of people who have filed Title IV complaints, only to be brushed off, blamed for the problem, or to discover that the intake officer thinks she is authorized to make findings of fact. (This is expressly not permitted, yet it happens in almost every instance.)

Sixth, persons at every level within the Episcopal Church must let go of clericalism. Gone are the days when the little people are impressed by a bishop who rolls through in a cloud of incense and watered silk. Similarly, being a priest, in and of itself, confers no special respect or standing. Indeed, some of the most loathsome human beings I have met are priests and bishops — and in my line of work, I already meet some remarkably unpleasant people. This blind deference to professional Christians serves only to damage the church and support an astonishingly narcissistic organizational culture.

Seventh, the church needs to stop with the nonsense that those who leave it are enemies. Indeed, a friend of ours who left the church in very similar circumstances to mine has served as a valuable resource to her former diocese’s Title IV committee. Yet too few bishops reach out to those hurt by the church to ask for their advice—or to see whether there is anything they can do to welcome them back. Indeed, drastic membership declines have become so normative for the entire denomination that no one seems to pay much attention anymore.

That is a sad state of affairs. And it’s not that hard to dash off an email and say, “Hey, I’ll be in your area. Do you have 30 minutes to grab some coffee and chat?”

Eighth, and finally, the church needs to understand that it will collapse from its own internal rot if it doesn’t clean up its act. Nor does it have decades to get it right. Any hope that the church as we know it survives, beyond a handful of endowed parishes like Trinity Wall Street, is fading fast in light of the ongoing exodus of members, the church’s inability to act with integrity, and its aging demographics. Indeed, even in a best-case scenario, about 25 percent of all parishes will close in the not-too-distant future due to small size, aging properties, and declining revenue and attendance.

As for my family and me, we have found shelter in the tranquil Society of Friends, otherwise known as Quakers. There, we have seen almost none of the gossip, intrigue, and mean-girl games that beset the Episcopal Church. But I look back with sadness on a church that was, for many happy years, my spiritual home.