We Mutilate the Human Community By Tolerating Sexual Predation and Abuse
a reflection on 1 Corinthian 5:1-11
📸: Alessandro Erbetta via Unsplash
“So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; look, new things have come into being!” (2 Corinthians 5:17)
I feel inspired by a sublime scholarly lecture on 1 Corinthians 5: 1-11, delivered by Fr. Kenneth Tanner. I have something quite specific and nuanced in mind, and I want to address this through a lens of compassion, co-suffering, communalism, and restoration.
Read: none of this comes from a spirit of condemnation. Read: we must try to hold restoration as the ultimate desired outcome whenever possible. Read: restoration doesn’t mean we forgo accountability and healing, and acknowledging harm done by the predator/trespasser. Read: society needs accountability and consequences of abusive actions and purveyance of justice in order to promote inclusivity and protect community. Limits are love.
What moves me to write this essay now?
I look around my society and see a great deal of ethical distortion, sexual disorder and predation corrupting the human community, creating dangerous and inappropriate conditions. This leads to a breakdown in society if unchecked.
Let me clarify before anyone gets the wrong idea. I’m talking about predation, about exploitation, and the gaslight that inclusivity means we must tolerate these evil things. I wholly reject the progressive notion that inclusivity means tolerating abuse, or that we can justify violence and abuse.
What am I talking about, specifically?
Rape culture—meaning tolerating rapists in our midst, meaning creating situations where we force the larger society to commune with un-rehabilitated rapists, where we provide cover for unrepentant predators, where we force children and women to share a communal presence with sexually disordered predators.
Rapists in female prison—Currently in Canada the government allows convicted rapists and other violent male offenders to identify as women in order to serve their prison sentences in female prison, a much easier prison environment in which to serve a criminal sentence. The be kind inclusivity cult of progressivism chooses to condone this unethical and immoral and predacious practise. Furthermore, the crown prosecutors and judicary across Canada do not take sexual violence or any violent crime serious enough and we see a high rate of recidivism. Allowing criminals to go free without any serious attempts to rehabilitate them and keep the larger society safe from their related harm destroys lives. It limits freedom.
Tolerance of domestic abuse—meaning when the community knows a person suffers abuse at the hand of their spouse or other family member. Many religious communities have in the past (and perhaps still do) turned a blind eye towards domestic abuse, thinking that the sanctity of marriage takes precedence over the life of the woman being abused. We make marriage an idol when we decide we can sacrifice a life for the supposed sanctity of marriage.
Giving cover to clergy and pastoral abusers and celebrity abusers—as has happened in the case of The Keepers, and Marcial Maciel Degollado, and in the American Evangelical Church. I include Jimmy Savile and Louis Mountbatten here, too. Giving cover to high profile sexual predators and abusers defies righteousness and human ethics to tolerate predators in our midst. It mocks G-d, it mutilates the Body of Christ.1
These scandalous impositions on our society move me to write this essay.
I’ll begin by sharing the Bible passage.
1 Corinthians:5-11
Sexual Immorality Defiles the Church
5 It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you and the sort of sexual immorality that is not found even among gentiles, for a man is living with his father’s wife. 2 And you are arrogant! Should you not rather have mourned, so that he who has done this would have been removed from among you?
3 For I, though absent in body, am present in spirit, and as if present I have already pronounced judgment 4 in the name of the Lord Jesus on the man who has done such a thing. When you are assembled and my spirit is present with the power of our Lord Jesus, 5 you are to hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.
6 Your boasting is not a good thing. Do you not know that a little yeast leavens all of the dough?7 Clean out the old yeast so that you may be a new batch of dough, as you really are unleavened. For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed.8 Therefore, let us celebrate the festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
Sexual Immorality Must Be Judged
9 I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral persons, 10 not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since you would then need to go out of the world. 11 But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother or sister who is sexually immoral or greedy or an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler. Do not even eat with such a one. 12 For what have I to do with judging those outside? Are you not judges of those who are inside? 13 God will judge those outside. “Drive out the wicked person from among you.”
Allowing sexual disorder to run rampant in any society harms the society. That’s a human fact. We simply cannot have a society in which the powerful and privileged can take advantage of and exploit and prey upon the disadvantaged and vulnerable. Inclusivity doesn’t mean accepting sexual abuse and predation. We cannot excuse predators and abusers because they have an untouchable elevated sacred status in our society. Boundaries and rules promote life and creativity. They must apply to all.
We can have no freedom without safety. We can have no safety in a community or society that excuses sexual disorder and predation.
In the above photographs we have two examples of privileged and powerful predators who sexually abused many children and vulnerable people, and got away with it because the authorities who could hand stopped it chose not to do so, out of fear or self interest. Marcial Maciel abused at least 60 young boys, he had a drug habit, and he violated his vow of celibacy by having a family, whom he abused. The Vatican knew about Maciel’s abuses for decades and chose not to act. Maciel, a top fundraiser for the church, proved more valuable to the ruling patriarchy of the Catholic Church. Jimmy Savile abused at least 200 people, some as young as 7 or 8. Despite receiving complaints, police refused to act on them.
Louis Mountbatten had a reputation for sexual depravity, it’s widely known he preyed on young boys at the Kincora Boys School in Ireland. Again, institutions of state meant to protect the public covered for LouLou. Not to mention helping him access victims to abuse. Sources such as the FBI have described Mountbatten and his wife as persons of extremely low morals and referred to LouLou’s perversion for young boys.
I’ve written previous about Adam Laboucan, and many others have as well. Per Anna Slatz of Reduxx: “The designation came after Laboucan sexually assaulted a 3 month old baby boy in Quesnel, British Columbia in 1997. As previously reported by Reduxx, Laboucan was 15-years-old at the time and had been hired to babysit the child. The infant was so brutally injured by the attack that he had to be flown to Vancouver, 410 miles away, to undergo reconstructive surgery.” Many many many have written at length about rapists serving their prison sentences in female correctional facilities and it’s fallen on deaf ears and it’s typically deemed hateful and “transphobic” to talk about the safety of carceral female people.
Finally, I’ll mention the story told by the Netflix show The Keepers. You can watch the series yourself to learn about the story of how the Vatican evades the law and enabled abuse by moving perpetrators to other communities or to so called rehabilitation centres. The latest news has the Baltimore Archdiocese declaring bankruptcy and asking for charitable immunity to evade accountability to survivors.
So, what does St. Paul say about this stuff? And you are arrogant! Should you not rather have mourned, so that he who has done this would have been removed from among you? Paul warns that Corinthians that their boasting is not a good thing. Do you not know that a little yeast leavens all of the dough? He urges them to clean out the old yeast so that [they] may be a new batch of dough, as [they] really are unleavened.
The Corinthians believed that, because Jesus had already made the sacrifice to save them, they could do anything they wanted. They boasted and behaved prideful and allowed the sin to fester in their community. They told themselves it was okay for that man to be sleeping with his mother or stepmother. They tolerated a longstanding incestuous relation because they thought Jesus had them covered.
How do we in our communities (and the larger society) rationalise the evil in our midst? What excuses do we give ourselves and our authority figures for allowing abuse and evil to take place unchecked? What reasons do we give for the ways we choose to let abusers get away with their crimes and the harm they’ve done?
What did the police tell themselves when they chose not to investigate Savile? What about the law enforcement agents who helped LouLou’s get victims to abuse or who participated in the coverup? What about the Vatican officials who let Maciel get away with his sexism abuse and drug addiction and violation of his celibacy vows? What do Corrections Canada officials tell themselves to justify placing rapists in female prison?
Paul likens the tolerance of sin in the congregation with yeast, or leaven. A trace of yeast can spread throughout the dough and contaminate its unleavened property. When we tolerate predation and abuse in our communities we invite leaven into our unleavened dough. How has allowing privileged sexual abusers continue their abuse infected our communities and society? How does the trauma spread because we do not have the moral courage to say no to abuse?
Paul urges the Corinthians to hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. What does he mean here? He doesn’t mean eternal condemnation. He does mean removing the unrepentant abuser from the community and helping them rehabilitate and right his wrongdoings and trespasses. He means corrective action, and a healing for the community. Paul most likely means handing over to the accuser or HaSatan as in the Book of Job.
What does Paul mean by verse 11? But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother or sister who is sexually immoral or greedy or an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler. Do not even eat with such a one. Note he specifically refers to those within the congregation. He doesn’t mean that the Corinthian Christians should refuse to have anything to do with unbelievers. Paul tells the Corinthians to avoid and call out anyone claiming to be a Christian, anyone in their congregation, who commits sins such as this incestuous man.
We call out trespassers so we may call them back in. When we don’t call them out for their offenses, we abandon them on the road to perdition. When we commit wrongdoing against others we also commit it against ourselves, because we harm our own soul or spirit anytime we do wrong that creates harm to others. It’s a bit like what we call karma in the secular vernacular.
The integrity of any community and any society hinges on establishing boundaries and enforcing those boundaries with rigour and compassion. Judgement serves compassion. Permissiveness serves contempt. Inclusivity cannot mean tolerating abuse. When we distort compassion to force victims to tolerate sexual predation and abuse, we mutilate and murder our community.
What if we could take the moral courage as a community and society to address the abuse we so flagrantly tolerate and enable? What if we could collectively remedy the plague of abuse and apathy towards abuse? Why do we tolerate sexual abuse and sexual predation? What are we afraid of?
I mean the community of Jesus followers when I say Body of Christ.