https://themennonite.org/feature/failure-bind-loose-responses-john-howard-yoders-sexual-abuse/
The
failure to bind and loose: Responses to Yoder’s sexual abuse
1.2.
2015 Written By: Rachel Waltner Goossen
Editor’s note: This is excerpted from a longer
article, “’Defanging the Beast’: Mennonite Responses to John Howard
Yoder’s Sexual Abuse,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 89.
During
the mid-1970s, the renowned Christian ethicist and theologian John Howard Yoder
embarked on an experiment in sexuality, devising his own guidelines and
selecting his own subjects, whom he called “sisters.”
Following a
three-year term as president of Goshen (Ind.) Biblical Seminary, he developed
“the notion of a distinction between two dimensions of sexuality, the familiar
and the genital.”
Yoder speculated that
people plagued either by inhibitions about sexual intercourse or by promiscuity
would have difficulty attaining what he termed “the freedom of the gospel,”
which he linked to Jesus’ encounters with women.
In a series of essays
that he circulated on the seminary campus and beyond, Yoder speculated about
Jesus’ sexuality as a model for his disciples, for the men who followed in his
path.
Nearly two decades
later, in 1992, a denominational task force established by leaders in Yoder’s
congregation, Prairie Street Mennonite Church in Elkhart, Ind., confronted him
with 13 charges of sexual abuse. “These charges indicate a long pattern of
inappropriate sexual behavior between you and a number of women,” the task
force told Yoder, who had been ordained while serving as the seminary’s
president. “The settings for this conduct were in many places: conferences,
classrooms, retreats, homes, apartments, offices, parking lots. We believe the
stories we have heard, and recognize that they represent deep pain for the
women. … The stories represent … a violation of the trust placed in you as a
church leader.”
In response to the
task force’s recommendations, the Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conference
suspended Yoder’s ministerial credential and urged him to enter counseling and
make restitution to women he had harmed.
Yoder,
who never disputed the 13 charges of sexual misconduct, agreed to take part in
the disciplinary process but maintained that he had never intended harm.
Yoder phrased his
misreading of women’s willingness to give consent as “falling off the
bike”—that is, something that was regrettable but unintentional.
In the mid-1970s,
when Yoder’s patterns of abuse emerged, he lived in Elkhart with Anne, his
wife, and six children.
He was a professor of
theology at the University of Notre Dame and taught
part-time at Goshen Biblical Seminary, which shared facilities with Mennonite
Biblical Seminary (now known as Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, AMBS.)
Yoder was a prodigious Mennonite leader, known for his lectures across Europe,
North America, Africa, Asia and Latin America. His 1972 book The Politics of
Jesus was considered a classic on religious pacifism, and his influence
across international academic circles was immense.
During the last 25
years of Yoder’s life, his sexual behaviors toward many women caused
significant harm.
A highly mobile
professor and churchman, he approached (mostly Mennonite) women both near and
far from home. Yoder’s advances included making suggestive comments, sending
sexually explicit correspondence and surprising women with physical coercion.
In a 1974
solicitation in which he appealed to women to engage with him, Yoder wrote: “Only thanks to your friendship,
sisterhood, can I do the theology.” Remarkably, he was conveying that they were
tools for him to use in his quest to perfect Christian theology.
Precise numbers will
never be known, but two mental health professionals who worked closely with him
from 1992 to 1995 as part of the Indiana-Michigan Conference’s disciplinary
process, believe that more than 100 women experienced unwanted sexual
violations by Yoder, ranging across a spectrum from sexual harassment in public
places to, more rarely, sexual intercourse.
More
than 100 women experienced unwanted sexual violations by Yoder, ranging across
a spectrum from sexual harassment in public places to, more rarely, sexual
intercourse.
With no legal charges
ever filed, adjudication took place in seminary offices, conference quarters
and living rooms—often involving Mennonites connected to Yoder through
congregational associations or even family relationships.
Despite Mennonites’
emphasis on local authority rather than entrenched hierarchies, these leaders’
interventions, while well-intentioned, were largely ineffectual.
By 1979, Yoder’s
supervisor at the seminary, President Marlin Miller, was documenting a surge of
disturbing incidents involving Yoder from as far away as South Africa and from
Strasbourg, France, headquarters of Mennonite World Conference. At the time,
U.S courts had not yet consistently defined sexual harassment, and employers
rarely called in law enforcement to respond to sexual misconduct.
Rather than firing
Yoder, who was his intellectual mentor as well as predecessor in the seminary
presidency, Miller kept meticulous records about what he learned. He summarized
calls and letters received—mostly from English speakers, but also some in
German and French—about women’s encounters with Yoder.
Miller’s
diary-like entries included details about his informants’ marital status and
whether they had reported “total disrobing,” as well as their rationales for
engaging with Yoder in his project.
Miller also kept
notes about women who reported that they had rebuffed Yoder’s sexual
aggressions.
Although Yoder and Miller,
hoping to avoid potential for blackmail, destroyed an unknown number of letters
in 1980, surviving documents reveal not only the egregious behavior of Yoder
toward some women but also the power that Miller used to enforce their silence.
For eight years, 1976 to 1984, engaging with Yoder via theological disputation
became the hidden agenda of Miller’s presidency.
Hoping
to save Yoder’s marriage and career, he used the data he had gathered to
repudiate his star faculty member’s notions about sexuality.
In 1980, Miller
established a disciplinary process with a small group at Goshen Biblical
Seminary in an unsuccessful attempt to bring Yoder to accountability.
This collection of
faculty and board members, who drew up a secret “covenant” with Yoder, was the
first of seven Mennonite groups to challenge Yoder from within institutional
bases:
• Covenant Group, Goshen Biblical Seminary, 1980-1984;
• Confidential Task Force, Goshen Biblical Seminary, 1982;
• Board of Elders, Prairie Street Mennonite Church, 1986;
• Prairie Street Mennonite Church/JHY Task Force, 1991-1992;
• Church Life Commission, Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conference, 1992-1996;
• Accountability and Support Group, Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conference,
1992-1996;
• Executive Board, Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conference, 1992-1997.
These groups had
varying goals: to engage Yoder
intellectually in his unconventional notions about sexuality, to investigate
rumors of sexual misdeeds; to arrange for meetings between women accusers and
Yoder as a step toward forgiveness and to discipline him.
No group succeeded
completely.
For
the last two decades of his life, Yoder discussed, sparred and negotiated with
these various parties.
In 1984, Miller and
members of the Covenant Group, having failed to stop Yoder’s behaviors,
recommended his separation to the seminaries’ boards.
Yoder was allowed to
resign, and he informed the theology department at the University of Notre Dame that he was leaving his adjunct position at
Goshen Biblical Seminary, adding that the decision had “delicate dimensions.”
For the coming decade, seminary insiders maintained confidentiality, and Yoder,
whose profile as theologian and ethicist would grow with his base at the
University of Notre Dame, was no longer welcome at
AMBS events.
Yoder’s
professional reputation suffered only marginally.
He was never formally
disciplined by the broader academic and religious peers with whom he was
affiliated, including the Society of Christian Ethics, where he served as
president in 1987-1988.
Yet through the
remainder of the 1980s and into the 1990s, the secrecy that had veiled Yoder’s
actions began to collapse.
Some women who had
experienced Yoder’s sexual aggressiveness leveraged their collective will to
force Mennonite leaders to stop his abuse. Their efforts at whistle-blowing
culminated with several dramatic events in 1992, a turning point in the
denomination’s dealings with Yoder.
Over the next several
years, Yoder sharply contested Mennonite conference officials’ right to retain
documents detailing his psychological functioning.
In 1996, concerned
about the implications of the sexual abuse charges on his legacy, he informed
Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conference officials that he was consulting a lawyer
about the conference’s plan to retain hundreds of documents—correspondence,
meeting minutes and mental health records—that they had used in determining not
to reinstate his credential.
Yoder’s dispute with
Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conference officials signaled that their four-year
disciplinary proceedings would miss the mark of reconciliation.
A year before his
death in 1997 at age 70, Yoder declared that “the initially stated goal of
restoration has been abandoned.”
Since Yoder’s death
more than a decade and a half ago, some admirers of his theology have offered
various explanations for his behavior.
But
in keeping the focus on Yoder rather than on the consequences of his actions,
these speculations deflect attention away from institutional complicity.
Yoder had lectured
extensively about the mandate of Matthew 18:15 for individual responsibility in
confronting wrongdoing, and seminary president Miller, along with an entire
generation of ordained leaders, had imbibed lessons on church discipline—in the
biblical phrase, “binding and loosing”—from Yoder through his widely
disseminated books and teaching.
Tragically, in
seeking to apply the Matthew 18 mandate for resolving conflict, Miller and
others in positions of authority responded with painstaking slowness to Yoder’s
abuse of power. Years of wasted time, energy and denominational resources
enabled the victimization of women living and studying on the seminary campus
and beyond.
The peace
theologian’s perpetration of sexual violence upon women had far-reaching
consequences among families, within congregations and throughout church
agencies—from AMBS to Mennonite Central Committee and missions programs to
Mennonite-affiliated institutions across the globe.
And the
reverberations continue today for anyone seeking to read Yoder as a credible
theologian.