Last week, I listed 3 statements about sexual entanglements of Christian leaders with their followers that I think must be better understood (i.e., these entanglements ought to be seen as abuse, we have to avoid black/white thinking about such labels as abuser and victim, deception is what powers us and blinds us to the abuse issues). I want to tackle this last one first. In almost every leader “fall” I’ve been connected to, each leader saw it as mutual and not one sided. This is not surprising since even pedophiles tend to see their relationships as mutual or even brought on by the child. How is this possible? The long practice of self-deception.
Deception is what allows us to call good something that is evil. No one dreams about taking advantage of someone weaker and no Christian leader dreams of violating their sheep. But it happens just the same. Not overnight–though it may seem that way. A man who has a one night stand may wonder the next morning how he could have done such a thing. But look at his history and you will always find a longer path to the behavior. Leo Tolstoy in his Confession, captures this slow transition quite well: “Quite often a man goes on for years imagining that the religious teaching that had been imparted to him since childhood is still intact, while all the time there is not a trace of it left in him” (p. 15).
How does this relate to leader abuse? The power of self-deceit has a tendency to elevate pride, it makes us seem more powerful, others need us, and what we are doing is somehow good. Leaders get sexually tangled with followers through self-decieving thoughts such as, “I’m going to treat him/her better than his/her spouse” or “I need some of her feedback because she seems to understand me better than others.” There are a hundred or one other ways we can tell ourselves that we or they need the special attention.
Self deceit also blurs memory and misconstrues reality. Often followers want to please and show care for their leaders. They don’t particularly like turning down requests. Thus, when a leader asks for something improper, many followers will feel caught between pleasing and rejecting. Some are more vulnerable than others due to previous history of having good boundaries violated. So, they accept and respond well to the leader’s crossing of a boundary (it may be a very small crossing at first). After the situation comes to light, the leader remembers the willingness of the other party and believes that the decision to cross the boundary was mutual. Deception hinders their ability recognize the power of their words and the inequality between the two of them. Thomas Brooks in Precious Remedies… reminds us that, “Satan knows that if he should present sin in its own nature and dress, the soul would rather fly from it than to yield to it, and therefore he presents it unto us…painted and gilded…” So, if we want to avoid leader abuse, we must do violence to our mental escapes and private playgrounds where we imagine others providing little sweet nothings that we so much crave and long for and think we “need.”
If you want to read more on the problem of self-deception from a counseling and theological perspective, you can find my chapter in Care for the Soul, a multi-author volume published by IVP in 2001.
Musings on Faith and Psychology 