Haunted: Reading with Carolyn and Nellie

The New York Times recently published an article about the revived process of accountability in the Mennonite church between our now-deceased, famed theologian John Howard Yoder and the victims of his sexual abuse. I’m not an expert on Yoder, and, like most people, I too am realizing that there is much I didn’t know about the extent of Yoder’s sexual coercion—both its content and its reach.

But I have been surprised by the number of people who were unaware this was part of Yoder’s past. I started reading Yoder in graduate school mere weeks before a lecture in an ethics class required to be taken by all students—in which I was informed of his misdeeds, the four-year accountability process that ensued, and the results of reconciliation just before his death. It has been distressing to know the extent of abuse was greater than previously thought. It is distressing that so many victims have not been able to heal. Our failures as a church, of the process, are distressing and frightening. Yet to call this a “cover up,” or to imply that somehow the church turned a blind eye, is disingenuous. The truth is this: we failed.

The way I experience this failure is not as a victim or an insider to the process but as a reader and learner, someone whose theology and practice have been formed by reading Yoder over the past decade. I have never known what to do with Yoder the abuser and Yoder the theologian. I cannot reconcile the two. And throughout my time reading him I have always been told to section off the man, that we all have shortcomings. I’ve been told that we would have no theologians left to read if we judged them by the measure of their own theology.