Brad speaks with veteran journalist Sarah Stankorb about her new book Disobedient Women. Disobedient Women is not just a look at the women who have used the internet to bring down the religious power structures that were meant to keep them quiet, but also a picture of the large-scale changes that are happening within evangelical culture regarding women’s roles, ultimately underscoring the ways technology has created a place for women to challenge traditional institutions from within.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, and I'm here today with a new guest, someone who I'm so excited to have on Straight White American Jesus, and that is Sarah Stancorp.
So, Sarah, thanks for stopping by.
Yeah, thank you.
So, you are the author of a new book called Disobedient Women, and this is what we're going to talk about today.
It's a unique book.
It's one that really talks about some of the scandals I think many people listening will be familiar with, but it does so from the perspective of the women.
Who use the internet to call out the abuse and other things happening in their communities.
So we'll get into that in a second, but before we do, let me just say that you're a very accomplished and seasoned reporter.
You write for places.
Your work is up here at the Washington Post Magazine, New York Times, Vogue, Marie Claire, Glamour.
The Guardian, The Atlantic, CNN Money, Fusion.
I mean, I can go on and on and on.
There's no way to name all the places your work has been.
And you've been nominated for several awards.
In June 2018, awarded a Society of Professional Journalists Excellence in Journalism Award.
Best community issue story award for rape culture lives here and so on and so on.
So you've been writing about these things for a long time.
Your book Disobedient Women just came out and it really does dig into the women's story, the stories of the women who exposed so many of the scandals that I think a lot of us are unfortunately familiar with.
We're going to jump into those.
Let me let me Stop and first ask about your own experience.
This book and this set of stories really kind of touches on your own journey.
What was the pathway for you to being the author of this book?
And actually, before I even keep going, I should tell the listeners, I have a vocal disorder.
This is how I always sing.
Brad is making me cry.
But anyway, I grew up with alcoholic parents.
And like many kids in that situation, I was scared a lot of the time.
And for me, my faith and turning to God was really my way of coping and my way of surviving.
So that's one piece.
Also about my family life being what it was.
made me eager to get out of my house.
So I went to the library a lot and I was a curious kid.
They once let me into the adult part of the library.
The religion stacks were like where I lived and for a long time It was perfectly okay to be, like, a young Presbyterian or Methodist kid and reading about Hinduism.
Like, I just wanted to know what everyone believed and what they thought.
I was super curious.
So that's part of it.
Up through high school, I had been a very mainstream, kind of middle-of-the-road Christian kid.
And then I just sort of, out of the outlet, learned some evangelical kit.
And I don't know if I can call it pure pressure, but it became very, very important for me to get saved.
And I didn't know if it meant I was sensitive.
We don't do that.
We don't talk like that.
So it was like, I didn't know the magic words or if I said them, it didn't feel any different.
I just, I understood that there were rules.
I hadn't been taught the rules.
And the more I spend time in those settings, like I can study the sound of different E's and N's, I got excited on like these rules that I had to follow.
And once I cared so much about these rules, It changed my faith in a way that it wasn't noticeable anymore.
So, I wouldn't say I personally wasn't evangelical, but my faith was like a lot of people in this country.
So, I'd swipe right in.
So, I'd swipe in.
It was enough to change things kind of forever for me.
That's such a poignant way to describe it, you know, a sideswipe.
Here you are a Christian person.
Here you are a Christian person in a way that your faith makes you feel like safe and that gets a refuge.
And yet the kind of influence of evangelicalism on your life really, as you say, is in some ways an image of how it works across the country.
You know, you, whether you like it or not, you come into contact with Evangelicals are going to tell you that, oh, you're doing Christianity wrong, or you're not doing it right, or you're going to end up in hell if you're not saying the prayer and that kind of thing.
Was it hard to dig into the material this deeply after your own experiences?
I mean, both with your home life and your father and with this kind of sideswiping of your religion?
Yeah.
The plan originally had, it meant to talk about my space journey as this like, not even a B-roll, like a D-roll of stories throughout the book, and part of that was I wanted people Outside of evangelism to feel like they had a home in the book too.
So I was planning on using my own situation as marriage advice.
And then it was like weeks, within weeks of learning I was getting the book deal inside the contract.
My father got very sick and it became clear my mother was not well.
And I became responsible for both of them, and then my father died, and I was responsible for this parent that I loved, who I also had these very complicated emotions about.
It changed how I looked at abuse in a philosophical way, which was helpful.
I definitely did not see it as a part of my life at the point, but it was happening while I was reading the books.
And the more I was considering what I had experienced, It struck me that I had this very scary childhood.
But a lot of the people I've been interviewing for years, they had that too.
Or they had domestic violence and sexual assault.
They had all these things.
And they also had an additional layer that I didn't.
And that was an understanding that what was happening could be justified.
That it was sanctioned by God, and they had this spiritual medium that was different than what I had.
Like, I had a thing, I loved it, I lost it.
They either stayed in it or had to leave that spiritual space because the thing that hurts the most became so aligned with God's will and badges that hurts in a way that
I think one of the things people will find in the book is that you are, you are an author who went about this project with deep empathy and a commitment to listening.
And I think, you know, just sharing the little bit of your story you have here Listeners will really get an understanding of why.
You yourself had a complicated relationship and one that was, you know, full of pain, but also with someone you loved.
And I think so many of the people in the book, if not all of them, had a similar experience, perhaps with parents, perhaps with loved ones, but also with the church and also with the faith that they had grown up in.
I mean, it's easy to think of having a bad experience and wanting to just get out, but so many people in the church Look at the church as a place of love and refuge, and yet when it's a place of pain and abuse, it's complicated.
So let's jump into some of that.
You know, you talk about an organization or denomination we've been hearing a lot about over the last month, and that's the Southern Baptist Convention.
You really give us this deep dive into Krista Brown and the ways that the SBC sex abuse scandals were revealed and reported on and ultimately came to light and shook the very heart of the denomination.
Can you just give us a little window into that story?
I mean, obviously there's a lot much longer treatment in the book, but what is a kind of entry point into what happened at the SBC?
Something I think a lot of folks are interested in.
Yeah.
So for me, and I hope this is applicable to other people, it helps sometimes to understand these big institutions.
So it will take one person.
So one person that I think is emblematic of a lot of the struggle to deal with abuse within the Southern Baptist Convention is Krista Brown.
She is an attorney who She's been kind of fighting this fight online longer than almost anyone, if by anyone.
She was, she describes being assaulted by her youth pastor between 1968 and 1969.
And at that time, it was framed as an attack.
Her story is really wrenching.
And as I know her stories are really wrenching and as it was happening, she was told like, this is what God wants you.
You know, if you question me, you're questioning God.
In addition to all the inner conflict she had, she didn't want any of this.
But as she aged through life, she coded it as an affair of trying to move on.
She was 16 when all of this happened with her adult, married, youth leader.
And it took until her own daughter was 16 for her to really stop And they, if it happened to my daughter, I wouldn't call it an affair.
And that's very common in a show on social abuse survivors.
It takes a well into middle age to really graph what was going to happen and call it what it was.
So, at all regimes, what is a protracted illegal case, but she did, out of civil and settlement, her church gave her a written apology.
But she also received this nugget of information that shaped a lot of the voices that came after her.
And the opposite, the Baptist General Convention of Texas came to the light.
Like, they had a list of who the probably accused abusive pastors were.
She just wanted that to be made public.
Because if they're going to be scared, they might abuse someone else, the church, at least the next church should know.
The next family should know.
And she started pressing SBC in 2007 to make There to make a list and make it public.
Meanwhile, online, out of an act of desperation and a little bit of faith that if I can show them, they'll see this is bad, she started a blog called Stop Baptist Predators and created her own database from publicly available sources.
And over a year, she got a list of 170 I mean, you've seen this.
It happens literally every day in social media.
Meanwhile, she's just going back to the SBC and just getting attacked and ripped apart.
And I mean, you've seen this.
It happened literally every day in social media.
Any time someone tries to tell a hard truth or even just a personal reality of abuse within the church context, the Babylon is immediate and is swift.
So that's what she lived through for years, and SBCC didn't really take it too seriously until 2019, when the Houston Cops came out with its abusive answer.
So there's a couple things that really jump out to me about Christa Brown's story.
One is this happens in the 1960s.
I mean, we're talking over half a decade ago, or half a century ago now.
And here Christa Brown has had the persistence to just you know, as you say, once her daughter became 16, to really stay on this issue and not let it go.
And it really shows the amount of work and labor and like absolute persistence it takes to like, do this for half a century, you know, and to keep going.
Uh, you know, I interviewed Robert Downen about the, uh, the Houston Chronicle story.
Friends, if you're listening and you, and you want to know about what happened with the in-depth reporting from out of, out of Texas on this issue, like look up my interview with Robert Downen.
I also interviewed Jonathan Crone, who was at the SBC when a lot of this came to light.
And, you know, you're just sort of reminding everyone of the fact that, um, The Southern Baptist Convention had a list of known predators, and they wouldn't release it, and they didn't, and you correct me if I'm wrong, they didn't do anything to get rid of those people out of the churches.
Yeah.
Right?
So after the answer was a hey, there started to be increased pressure from MSPT messengers to do something.
So there was 12 marching orders for the investigation that came out in 2022.
And that's where it was revealed that all this time Christophe was like demanding, demanding, demanding.
And accordance of other people who had been fishing behind the scenes at the Baptist Church had been saying, like, make a list, make it public.
There was a list.
So, one of the attorneys, the former general counsel for SBC, who had nasty things to say about Krista, his own staff have been keeping outlets, starting the same year she approached SBC, and that was back in the 60s, and included Brian's case.
So there are these moments where years later you realize you had a war being heard by someone in there.
But largely, in order to be violent.
And that's part of why the title of this book is Disobedient Women.
Because having the audacity to say, this is happening, this is wrong, you have to fix this.
They were treated as genitals, the bowels, the spines, the stomach, any of the immune system.
They were being disobedient to the men in the position of authority.
And that turns on top of everything else they have to deal with.
And Krista said the way she was treated by the SBC is worse than the abuse itself.
Hi, my name is Peter, and I'm a prophet.
In the new novel, American Prophet.
I was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened.
Oh, and the pandemic.
And that crazy election.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging.
It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country, and meet some really interesting people, and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
Yeah, I mean I guess for me to just again to think about over the course of Krista's life from 1968-1969 to the 2020s is that's just something to behold in itself in terms of the fight and the resolve.
A lot of folks If we just switch tracks slightly, a lot of folks are watching a documentary about a certain family that had 19 children called the Duggars, and the Duggars have been part of American life for over a decade now.
One of their sons is now infamous for his abuse of his His sisters and so on.
The Duggars never fully, in my knowledge, and I'm happy for you to correct me, identified as part of the Quiverfull movement, but so many of us who watched and paid attention have sort of said, you know, the book of James says it's about works and not faith, and you know, it seems like everything you do is Quiverfull, even if you're not telling us you're part of Quiverfull.
Where do the Doublers, the queer reform movement, and that whole nexus of conservative American Christianity fit into disobedient women?
Yeah, so it's definitely one of the happiest moments in my everyday life, where I talk about what I'm studying.
And most people have no idea what I'm talking about.
And everywhere I go, people are like, have you watched Shiny Happy Teeth?
Well, I guess I have.
I watched it the day it came out.
So, yes, there's a lot to say here.
So, on the quiverful front, that's a word a lot of people who act out, quiverful, and it means like producing as many children for the army of God as you possibly can.
They don't like that word.
So, you can live it and do it and then say, well, it's not me.
So, that's not unusual.
Within the book, there's like one moment in particular I always thought like people read the books that you picked up at your home's conference that Encourage you to please have as many children as you can.
Increase the population of Christians in this country with your womb.
And even if you die trying, well then you're a martyr for God.
So that's an element here.
The other part of this is that ideas like this pop up.
By ministries like Bill Gothard's, and it's kind of that floating head that you see many times in Shiny Happy People.
So his ministry, Institute of Invasive Life Principles, IVLP, was huge within a segment of American Christians.
I had no earthly idea who he was growing up, but many conservative Christians followed.
They went to his conferences, they went to his seminars, he came to their church.
I've had more than one source say he was the event of a whole cult.
I mean, he had minutiae that he cared about.
He would have, in his books, explain how you should wear your hair to be modest, how you should position your face.
I mean, like, so many details.
But, well, it was gotch, oh, it was, he had a cabbage patch job.
There was so much that kind of wrapped his opinions around people, and the divers were kind of the poster child for his movement.
What I think folks outside IBLP circles are now realizing is abuse within families was not uncommon.
But also that need and power structure that Godfrey preached and kind of enforced throughout the ministry also put him in a position where he had the ability to do inappropriate things for us people.
And a lot of that is also in this book.
If people are unaware of God, or they may not have heard of the Umbrella of Authority, also called the Umbrella of Spirituality, but just so people are aware, it's this idea of an umbrella underneath an umbrella of God, or an umbrella underneath And way over top, you have God.
And underneath that, you have maybe a pastor, then you have the father, then you have the wife underneath, and then children completely down underneath.
And if you behave yourself, and you follow all those areas of authority, you're protected from Satan, which exists outside the umbrella.
So, the ability to question, either your parents or someone like Godfrey, who's basically next, is really very small.
And if you do question, you're basically Satan's advantage.
And that's just, that was a lot of history.
Bill Gothard is someone I think more people are being, are now aware of because of, you know, Shiny Happy People and the documentary and talk about these things.
And I've seen a lot of folks on social media saying, I never knew, you know, Bill Gothard, who that was.
And if you, if you're listening and you don't know, I mean, I would say you can watch the documentary, you can, You can also think of Guthard as kind of like the James Dobson you've never heard of, with perhaps an even more, or, well, hard to say.
Not going to get into the business here of judging who's more insidious.
I'm going to just leave that alone.
And say, at least on par with James Dobson in terms of his insidiousness, if not his influence.
Would you give us just one minute on how did, you know, you talked about Krista Brown and just a half century of persistence and resolve to expose the SPC.
What happened in this case, you know, just in brief, of course, there's way more in the book, but yeah.
So, essentially, until about 2011-2012, there was a huge outcry, and people who did have native experiences thought it maybe just happened to them.
But then there was a blog called Reciprocating Grace that first just began the story of saying, hey, abuse happened in these two areas.
And then someone wrote in saying, oh, it's happened at headquarters, and it happened with Bill Gloucester.
And there was a detail of her story that the advocates behind the blog had seen or seen.
And then I floodgated it.
And it was fascinating in a very disturbing way how consistent patterns of abuse, the patterns of planting young girls out of these conferences, while in Stephen's in the headquarters, while in Stephen's in the headquarters, and then their stories are just rather consistent from there.
Once the blog blew things up, eventually there was a lawsuit against IVLP and against IVLP in Cawthard.
And at a certain point, the case just fell apart.
And then, Gothard and his other Gothard supporters were being very persistent in reaching out to the abusive parents of these monks who had come forward.
And they got very scared.
And for the case to go forward, they needed a couple of people still within statute of limitation.
Yeah, that's so much to say here.
Just about the pattern of abuse, the luring people to the headquarters, the intimidation campaign, it's all in the book.
But yeah, disturbing to say the least.
You know, before we close here, one thing we talk a lot about on the show and I talk a lot about in my own work is Christian nationalism.
One of the things I think you do is try to show us that Christian nationalism is a lot of things, and one of them is patriarchal.
It's hurtful to women.
It's asymmetrical in its gendered structure.
How would you just briefly explain that to someone who doesn't see the connection?
Hey, I think Christian nationalism is just God and country, people who love the United States and love Jesus.
How is that patriarchal?
How could that hurt women?
Yeah, well, it's just, it's sort of built into a logic model.
So at first, I was trying, I actually drew a diagram to try to understand where all these things overlap.
Because there was gender, there was race, there was power, there was authority, there was nationalism.
And I realized they all share this logic of a power imbalance.
That diminishes a group of people and places them in a lesser category.
Functionally, you have the same people preaching that women should be producing as many Christian babies as possible as part of their familial role and also to populate the nation with Christians.
You have the same folks arguing pushing to homeschool to help protect their kids from a sexual education, but also doing so to accept a generation of evangelical Christians for an important governmental role.
You have the same folks with anti-sexual slavery and encouraging a strategic dominion over communities.
You also have saints that are scoping out the Jews in order to protect the power and influence out of ministries and churches.
And I think in all of those cases, in patriarchy and in Christian nationalism, to me, the justification behind elevating men or elevating Christians or everyone else, it's kind of a weak position.
Like there's plenty of evidence, people live out of the way.
And I think that doesn't matter when you push back either against Christian patriarchy or Christian nationalism.
That's why you get these dramatic, major, angry, threatened responses, because it is a weak power.
That doesn't mean it doesn't cause damage, but it's a weak power that is often defended with violence and fear.
It's one of the things that comes through in the book and I think that people will probably walk into the book intuitively knowing but will walk away having a very vivid understanding of which is When Krista Brown calls out the SBC or really just will not stop calling for the release of the list, etc.
When there are women talking about abuse and the ILBP, when there are people who are calling out these men who are in power, the reaction is not, oh, yeah, we'll think about that or we'll see.
I mean, it is a violent.
Yes.
Like strong, we will destroy you kind of reaction.
And, you know, I think that's very clear in the work that you do, because, you know, the book is really based on just such a model of deep listening and insight into the lives of the women who really exposed all of this and their bravery and courage.
You know, one thing we haven't talked about, and I'll just this will be my last question is, You know, the internet, sometimes it's not great.
We, you know, I don't know, it gives us things we don't necessarily need.
But is it safe to say that a lot of what has happened in the exposure of the abuse that you're discussing here is because the internet provided a forum for women to tell stories, to join in solidarity, to expose those in power?
Yes, absolutely.
I think one of the things that's true about abuse is that it isolates a person.
So whether it's because it's a fear or the abuser wants you to be alone so you can't tell.
A lot of people with these really hard experiences thought they were alone, but then they saw online Someone else said, oh my gosh, they all have the same experience.
And then as you start to reach a certain threshold, and Rowan's Astonished Wanderer shows hundreds, thousands, millions of people.
You stop thinking it's me.
You stop thinking it's the person who did this to me.
You start to question the institution.
And I think that's been the natural evolution of this movement.
And it's frustrating.
I think, going back to your first question, one of my motivations for this talk is There's been great reporting, like, people like me and Robert Townley.
There's loads of people who've gotten these stories.
We wouldn't have known about them without the internet.
We wouldn't have known about them without the hashtag.
There are these podcasts that show, like, my art isn't art, my art isn't all of Marcel.
They show all these dramatic arts.
The bloggers were writing about that for years.
There's no credit given to that.
So it's like more free labor for women.
I just, yeah, I mean.
I think that's honestly, I think that's why, you know, what am I trying to say?
There's a lot of folks writing right now about deconstruction and about different aspects of the Christian nationalist American landscape.
I think what makes your book unique and essential reading is what you just said.
It's like, we usually hear about this way down the line when there's a big expose, and thank God for those.
Those are good.
Behind those exposés, rewinding decades, were women who would just not give up, even when no one listened, even when they felt like they were just alone, when no one cared, when it was hopeless.
They were like, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna stop.
And, you know, this book really goes back to that source, rather than sort of, you know, picking up down the road with the story.
And I think that's where it's most powerful, because you're really hearing it from their Uh their voices and it's different when it comes from the source itself and the and the struggle itself rather than the results or just the look at the SPC and how they voted or something like that.
So yeah well first thanks for writing this book.
Thank you for uh just the the all of the work it took uh and thanks for stopping by today.
Where can people link up with you and find the book and see all the cool stuff you're doing?
Oh, so this isn't the answer I should have thought about and imagined.
I think just heading to my website, sarahstancord.com.
I've also put some links there.
Twitter is collapsing.
I don't know.
Well, yeah, Twitter, who knows?
We don't know yet.
It looks like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are going to have a MMA match to decide who gets to control the threads.
So anyway.
All right, friends, as always, find us on Straight White JC.
Find me at Bradley Onishi.
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