According to Dr. Suzanna Krivulskaya, Protestant sex scandals are a study in the relationship between ecclesiastical power and popular media. Her book, Disgraced: How Protestant Sex Scandals Transformed American Protestantism traces this relationship from the 18th century to the present, attending to the shifts in popular sentiment around clergy misconduct. In doing so, she is able to demonstrate how scandals inform both the representation and reception of Protestant clerical power over time and why it is that the scandals of today no longer threaten religious authority as they once did.
Scandals are tricky beasts in that they exist at the triple crossroads of rumor, representation, and actual event. When it came to church and sex in the 19th century, the stakes were high, especially for institutions and their leaders invested in the twin virtues of purity and piety. Krivulskaya’s astute analysis of this time period relies on the recognition that sexual purity granted moral authority to women and marked religious communities as orthodox in their teachings. Sexual impropriety among church leaders, then, raised questions about the adequacy of religion as a moral force. Using popular and journalistic media, Krivulskaya draws upon scandal reports to demonstrate how the media created entry-points for the public to enter into these dilemmas regardless of their actual relationship to the events under scrutiny.
Krivulskaya carefully documents how the emergence of the press created a new source of moral authority by revealing the transgressions of religious leaders. The first chapter details the story of Sarah Cornell, a young woman who sought employment in Lowell, Massachusetts at a time when young women’s independence from their families was perceived as a dangerous proposition and stories of their corruption made for thrilling headlines. Cornell entered into a relationship with a local Methodist pastor, Ephraim Avery which lasted two years. When she became pregnant, the clergyman murdered her in hopes of keeping both the relationship and the pregnancy a secret.
Reverend Avery’s was just the first trial to become “a referendum on religion,” (p. 16) as the media offered the public access to information that stirred questions about the trustworthiness of religion as a moral guide. But in doing so, they stretched the acceptable boundaries of public indecency. According to Krivulskaya, purity reformers sought “to preserve the purity of religion and the chastity of the nation… (they) dove into the dirty and the unseen with zeal and determination” (p. 18). By this time, newspapers had just begun running human-interest stories and no longer assumed a protectionist stance toward churches and their leaders. A financial windfall for the media business, scandals such as that around Cornell’s death also surfaced a new tide of criticism toward religion.
Avery’s crimes, though most heinous, amounted to very little compared with the coverage of Reverend Henry Ward Beecher’s affair a century later. As Krivulskaya details, by the 1870s, news media was expansive and the public’s desire for scandal even more so. There was no longer a question of whether or not the public should be exposed to such debauchery. As the most prominent Protestant clergyman of his time, Beecher was a moral bellwether for the nation. Revelations of his infidelity created a spiritual crisis in a time when many valued his moral leadership on issues such as abolition and the Civil War.
In her analysis of Beecher’s trial and the media surrounding it, Krivuskaya deftly characterizes the antagonism between religion and sexuality in US public life, a current that has animated most studies in the field. Writing about how the “lines between good religion and promiscuous heterodoxy were blurred,” (p. 52) she teases out the ways that sexual and religious purity maintain theological orthodoxy for those invested in purity regimes. Conversely, sexual promiscuity points toward religious fallibility, as if a singularity of religious truth is a form of spiritual monogamy that can be threatened by bodies doing what they do.
In the present, the association between clergy and scandal is commonplace. With just about every Christian institution implicated in a sexual abuse crisis, the concept of scandal feels like a tease in comparison. This does not escape Krivulskaya who recognizes that clergy scandal in the 21st century simply does not matter. Among white evangelicals, powerful men know how to protect and rehabilitate one another’s reputations while using purity teachings to perpetuate a culture of silence around clergy sexual misconduct. For example, despite significant pressure from members and survivor advocates, the Southern Baptist Convention has failed to institute any changes that prioritize protecting people who have experienced sexual abuse from a church leader. The theological complementarianism taught by the church asserts that men are innately sexually driven, and women are sexually disinterested which normalizes a gendered framework of male aggression and female subordination. According to the SBC and other churches who promote gender complementarianism, this framework was designed by God to order our personal lives, our communities, and the social order. Though numerous scholars, survivors, and survivor advocates have explained how gender hierarchies such as these create the circumstances by which sexual abuse can thrive, evangelicals reject any teaching that threatens what they understand to be a divine order.
Disgraced has a lot to teach us about how we got to a place where revelations of sexual abuse within Christian organizations are a regular feature of religious life in the United States. Media are no longer merely a counterpoint, but the lynchpin of an accountability system that many churches fail to provide. Even as journalists struggle against the extinction threats of capitalism and authoritarianism, they continue to urge the public to support survivors and hold perpetrators and those who harbor them accountable. At the end of Krivulskaya’s book, you realize that throughout the history of US Protestantism, those most concerned with purity and orthodoxy are the least committed to the truth. But we are left with a fierce set of survivors, advocates, and their allies who are not afraid of the truth our bodies tell.
