Belittling of Women

How the Words of Baptists, Bros and Bullies Make the Body Keep the Score

A woman in an office

This week, my goal was to just not throw up in the trash can at work, like I did last year just after I watched Rick Warren speak “on behalf” of women pastors at the Southern Baptist Convention in New Orleans. I’m a physically healthy person, not one prone to throwing up, typically, and certainly not in my office trash can at work. Yet, there have been three times in my 3 years of recovering from a hostile work environment in a faith based workplace that my body has shown me that it has kept the score by suddenly vomiting from trauma.

The first one was when I woke up suddenly in the middle of the night on my one year traumaversary of being fired in retaliation for reporting my abuse at my church and heading straight to the bathroom to vomit up what my body was urgently needing to purge. I am not one who often wakes up in the night. My husband has always said that sleeping is my superpower. Another was a year ago in a secondary trauma of watching the dueling men at microphones at the Southern Baptist Convention debating the worth of women pastors when suddenly, the office trash can was fortunately conveniently right there in a way I’d never needed it to be before.

Growing up in church I was taught that the Bible refers to the church as the “body of Christ,” with a metaphor about how each person in the church is like a body part, contributing their individual gifts to the body in which no part is more important than another. The parts of the body (the individuals within the church) are to have mutual concern for one another.

Women are included in this body. Their gifts are included in this body, and no gift is more important than another. No spiritual gift is given based on gender. In this sense, it’s not just individual bodies of women that have been abused and traumatized. It is also the church itself- the body. That body too keeps the score.

Trauma makes itself known, even when we want to pretend it’s not there. The work of healing from a psychologically, verbally, spiritually and financially abusive work environment where belittling, intimidation, coercion, bullying, gaslighting and name-calling were happening in on-one-one or two-on-one meetings, has taken me 3 years of intensive therapy. I am a fighter, both for my own healing and for the healing and prevention of abuse in the advocacy work I do in my spare time.

I am utterly grateful to be in a workplace now where I am flourishing, and helping others to flourish in a global tech company based in Silicon Valley. Even though I would have given my gifts to the church and paid ministry for the rest of my life, it became clear that the faith tradition I was in didn’t fully want my gifts, and whether out of discomfort or Christian patriarchy, wanted to make them (and therefore me) small. So, I made a decision a few years ago to pivot careers and let my light shine in a new industry. Wellbeing in my workplace is so much easier to navigate in my Silicon Valley tech company than it was when I worked in an Southern Baptist megachurch. Yes, I know that is a shock to many, but it is my lived experience as a woman who worked as a Southern Baptist pastor where I was exploited to make the lead pastor look pro-woman when he was indeed not in many of his off-the-stage interactions.

My boss at work is a Vice President of our company, a leader with who brings equal parts warmth and high expectations, and knowing the vote on the Law Amendment was happening in the SBC on Wednesday, she gave me Wednesday off work as a mental health day. I didn’t ask for it. She is just that kind of attuned leader, who leads with kindness and compassion even though she has us working incredibly hard to produce global outcomes. She is a people-first leader, and has pastored me way more than my lead pastor at a megachurch ever did. What a statement. What a gift.

Even though I went into this week of the SBC convention meeting happening more prepared for how my nervous system would react, I found myself tense, triggered, and needing as much time implementing my somatic practices of DBT therapy as possible. For me personally, that means floating in water, and I went to float in the pool after work as many days after work as I could.

My survivor and advocate friend Johnna Harris sent me a playlist, including the song she had chosen as the song to represent the episode of the Bodies Behind the Bus podcast that she co-hosts where I was interviewed. The song she chose for my particular episode was “Can’t Stop a Woman,” and playing that song through my earbuds while floating on my float and drinking a cold mango-flavored sparkling water served to keep replaying that same song in my head throughout the following days. I found myself waking up in the morning with that song in my thoughts, as a soundtrack of sorts as I went about my day.

Me floating and listening to music that reminds me of the strength of women

Coming out of an environment where men are excused for belittling women one-on-one or at microphones at a convention of a Christian denomination representing almost 13 million people means that some lies need replacing with truth. Replacing a lie that says women are secondary and secretaries for men’s dreams and ambitious leadership means replacing it with words of the worth of women and songs about the strength of women which literally ring true in our heads. It’s the work of surviving.

I recently learned in a BBC video about the neuroscience related to singing in groups. In this video, British journalist Sophia Smith Galer informs that oxytocin, the bonding hormone, gets released as we sing together, and our breathing and heartbeats synchronize, helping us feel both emotionally connected to others and regulated. Singing together stimulates the vagus nerve and helps us feel secure with each other. This security felt when singing together in worship in a megachurch that may otherwise feel unsafe due to abuse going on behind the curtain could be an intended or unintended outcome to produce a sense of security for those who may have seen red flags.

This may partially explain why my former lead pastor who has bullied and intimidated many women and men in his church staff for years panicked in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when Dr. Sarah Cody made an ordinance against indoor singing in groups. He tried and even did break those ordinances in Santa Clara county, like another church in San Jose did that is well-known for abuse and coverup. Whether or not he knew or understood the neuroscience, we all know how it feels in our bodies to sing in unison in a church serve, at a sports game, or at a Taylor Swift concert. It feels really good. It connects us with each other on an emotional level, and it draws us into unity within a community.

Many who deconstruct their religious tradition after an abusive experience often talk about how they miss the congregational singing. The neuroscience explains why. It also explains how this could easily be manipulated by what Dr. Karen Mitchell, Ph.D. describes as “manipulative intelligence.” Manipulating peoples’ natural human longings for community by urging worship leaders to play music at a certain volume, with a particular beat, with a robust background track, cueing fog machines to start at certain points, and strategically placing crescendos at just the right moment can be tools of emotional and spiritual manipulation to push congregants into an emotionally-driven decision to be baptized or give very sacrificially in an offering.

In a church staff culture that lacks a robust conversation around consent, where on the church staff where I once worked staff would say, “no one says ‘no’ to Pastor Andy,” you have a culture that is a petri dish where abuse of any type can grow however it wants.

That is why I speak, write, podcast and decided to get loud. It’s to warn. No one should have to experience abuse in a faith environment. No one should have to hear words filled with microagressions or macroagressions spoken out loud, especially in religious conventions that belittle them as a woman. No one should have to endure that. No one.

I’m happy to say I accomplished my goal of not throwing up in a trash can at work this week. However, that is not due to a random coincidence. It was due to the hard work of implementing somatic practices to regulate my nervous system that was dysregulated with the complex PTSD from the trauma of the psychological abuse of having my pastor belittle me and intimidate me in his office, alone. It was also due to the realization that caught me off guard last year that I was experiencing a secondary trauma of watching Rick Warren speak and be portrayed as a hero for women pastors. This celebrity pastor and founder of Saddleback church who hired Andy Wood, the pastor who bullied me and many other staff while also covering up that abuse was anything but a hero.

The truth was, he was not listening to many women, women pastors, and women survivors. It was hard last year to watch egalitarian women, hoping for some sign of change in a denomination that had ramped up a battle against them, put their hope in a man that I knew had no integrity with women whom he had ignored and dismissed behind the scenes. The Echo Survivors know all too well that Rick had both ignored the abuse stories of women and men and had given Saddleback church over to a man whose abuse has caused multiple women whom he abused to have panic attacks years after the abuse. We know that many of our Echo Survivors still are silenced by NDAs, and that Rick is complicit in that, ignoring to this day the over 1,600 signatures on a petition to release them.

woman speaking at a microphone

I too, had once believed Andy Wood was an egalitarian, when he recruited me to move from Singapore to be the second woman pastor on staff at Echo church in San Jose. It was a shock to my system and my reality when I saw how horribly he treated me and certain chosen targeted women behind the scenes. Once you see men like these for who they are- faux egalitarians, it changes you. It gives you an awareness of the fact that some men portray themselves as pillars of society, as heroes rescuing a particularly downtrodden group for a reason. That reason is to evoke praise for their noble efforts, and for it to be very difficult for anyone to believe any allegations of abuse or coverup of which they have been guilty. It’s a perfect cover.

That reality made me physically ill last year. It made me ill in a way that even in the moment of all the debate going on over whether women were able to hold the position of pastor in Southern Baptist churches, the nuance of this narrative was lost and would mean that more women would be groomed, abused and silenced by men portrayed as heroes. In this, even though I had escaped all that, it hadn’t escaped me.

Even with all the years of healing and intense therapy, when the abuse one endures is done by a celebrity of any sorts- a Supreme Court justice, a CEO of a large media company or a celebrity pastor, the chances for secondary trauma are high when their face or the faces of those who covered for them in their bro club appear on a screen. Escaping isn’t fully possible without basically living in a cave or completely off the grid somehow. It means the work of healing is that much harder, that much more complex, and can often catch someone off guard in a workplace on a Wednesday. It means that when survivors and advocates plead for pastors to be held accountable, for complicity of those who platform and speak on stages with those pastors to be called out, and for us to have a survivor-centered approach to reform, that this robust type of approach is undoubtedly needed.

Surviving is incredibly hard work, the burden of which is placed on the survivor even as they pick up the pieces of their lives. It is a work I am committed to for myself and others who are in this journey too. I am so much more healed than I was a year ago, and definitely more than I was 3 years ago when my spirit was freshly bruised from being beaten black and blue.

Words matter. Words can injure deeply. Words can diminish, intimidate, evoke fear, wreck nervous systems and belittle. Words can also bring healing, embolden, and inspire.

If you are a woman and you heard words spoken from microphones or in written in posts from Baptists this week that made you question your worth, I want you to hear it from me. You matter. You are a force. You were created with God-given gifts to make a difference in this world. You don’t have to be small or believe the belittling words that shrink you to a size small enough to be under a man’s thumb even when he is telling you he is “fighting for” you. God would never want this for the daughters made in God’s own image. You are worthy, and your voice and your hopes and ambitions matter.

It’s ok to take up space, to speak your thoughts out loud, to preach, to teach, to pastor, to lead, and to leave. It’s ok to be fully you, to have big goals, and to live large.