The Devastating Loss of Innocence

A young girl goes through hell in order to save herself from hell.

In my last post here, I wrote about the time two men who deemed themselves prophets, arrived at our church and asked us to check our brains and dollars at the door. (See https://lindahoenigsberg.substack.com/p/a-whole-new-level-of-weirdness).

By the time that event took place, I had been attending church for thirteen years. I had begun noticing the level of weirdness ramping up in the churches I attended, but I didn’t allow myself to think very hard about it. In my mind, if it wouldn’t have been for church, I would either be dead or locked up in an insane asylum. I couldn’t risk allowing myself to start to doubt any of it.

Up to that point, I took the things I saw and heard within church culture as “gospel.” I believed that if something didn’t make sense to me, it was my fault…I just didn’t have enough faith. It was like we were supposed to suspend reality and no matter how absurd, we should look the other way. We were living in the world of the “unseen” now that we were Christians. We were living in the kingdom of God, for heaven’s sake. Not on planet earth. That was for sinners…people who just don’t even care about God or where they will end up eternally. Questioning or doubting was a sign you were backsliding and you better watch out or the boogie man (the devil) may get you!

Being the compliant, insecure, anxiety-filled young woman that I was, I kept my questions to myself.

By this time, my two eldest children were teenagers. If there was one thing that was important to me, it was their souls. I had carefully protected them (I thought) from “the world.” From the time they were six and three, I had raised them “in the church,” where they learned not to piss God off by dancing, playing cards, or going to a movie. I didn’t allow them to go to their school dances or listen to “secular” music. I diligently read lyrics and tore up and threw away anything that may cause them to lose their sensibilities and be drawn away from God or the church. Certainty is a strong drug, and I was addicted.

If there was one thing I felt good about, it was how I saw myself as a mother. After being raised in an alcoholic, dysfunctional family, doing a stint in juvenile hall, and being thrown out of high school, it felt good to me to have what I considered normal family life. Look at me! I am a good mother! I am protecting my children from the evil world! So I diligently took them to church every Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday night. They enjoyed it! Or so I thought.

What my kids were experiencing was nothing I could have ever imagined. I knew that there were stories of kids being molested by Catholic priests and even knew some of them as adults. I saw the impact of these experiences in real time. But it never occurred to me that something like that could be happening right within our own safe bubble of the youth group that I actually drove my kids to every week of their teen years.

My daughter has a best friend. Her name is Michelle. I can say her name because what I am about to tell you is in her memoir, “Undefined: More than the Sum of my Losses.” The girls met in junior high school and are extremely close to this day, over forty years later. Michelle lives in California while Alia lives in South Carolina, but that doesn’t stop them from having real life girl time every single year.

Michelle’s memoir includes horrific things she experienced at our church. After she was raped by the manager of her workplace, she became pregnant. The youth group was about to embark on a trip to see our nation’s capital and Michelle had plans to go. It was all she thought about. She was early enough in her pregnancy that she believed she could get away with enjoying this one last time she’d be able to feel like a teenager, on an outing with other teenage friends.

Since Michelle’s mother worked at the church as the director of the pre-school, Michelle and her mother agreed that Michelle should tell the pastor about what happened and her condition. The pastor told her that in order to go on the trip, she would have to get up before the youth group and confess her indiscretion and ask for forgiveness. Michelle, in her teenage mind, still trusted the pastor, the youth pastor, and her parents to know what was best for her. They were the voice of God, after all. That’s what we were taught. Obey those in authority over you (Romans 13:1).

Before the “confession” was set to take place, Michelle attended a normal youth night. It was a movie night held at the home of a “youth leader,” a volunteer helper working with the teens. Some of the kids wanted to go to the store for drinks and snacks, but Michelle wasn’t feeling well and decided to stay back at the house. The youth leader, a man in his mid-thirties, hung back too and insinuated he needed help setting up the movie. Michelle decided it was a good idea to confess her pregnancy to him before the formal confession meeting coming up so she would have some support from someone she trusted. He encouraged her to tell him everything that happened…in finite detail.

He began prying into the night she got pregnant, reaching for intimate details. When she told him the manager of her workplace had first put his hand on her leg in the car, the youth pastor said, “Like this?” as he put his own hand on her leg. Michelle froze. As Michelle writes in her book, it was a “strange parody,” of what happened to her during the rape. Within minutes, this thirty-something year old man raped Michelle and cleaned himself up before the youth group returned. Michelle would never be the same. Her trust in the world and in all those who were supposed to care about her shattered at her feet. Michelle, not wanting to grieve her parents, didn’t tell them.

And then Michelle’s apology tour was scheduled for the next youth night. Michelle and her parents sat on the front row as other youth came in and took their seats.

Michelle knew that the senior pastor was going to come into the meeting. What she didn’t know was that he was busy announcing to his congregation of hundreds sitting in the main sanctuary that she was going to be speaking in the youth room and they all needed to come into the meeting as well. Suddenly, a few became standing room only.

The lead pastor made his way through the crowd and began speaking.

“One of our high school girls “claims” to serve God, yet she has found herself in complete sin…[she] has been falsely representing herself as a godly girl …[and she has been] pretending to be something she [is] not[and] is a poor example of a leader.”

Michelle’s humiliation was complete. Thank God she was stronger than they thought. Her story is amazing and I highly recommend her memoir.

I knew none of this. I wasn’t there that night. I can only hope that I would have acted as some of the parents in the room did and scooped up my teens and walked out, never to return again. I have no idea why my kids didn’t tell me about this meeting or the other things that were happening there. All these years later they cannot explain that either. We all just took for granted that this is how church life works.

Years later, Michelle got a call from the church secretary asking her if knew of anyone who had been molested by the youth pastor, as he had been accused by another victim. Michelle admitted that she has also been raped by him. She was told that he was going to be in a small meeting where he wanted to apologize to his victims and since she was also a victim, the staff wanted her there as well. By this time, Michelle was engaged to be married, and when she told her fiance about this meeting, he insisted they should both attend. “How can you be sure he’ll tell the truth?” he reasoned.

As they listened to the youth pastor’s apology, Michelle was stunned. For one thing, he only apologized to her. The other victims weren’t mentioned. She sat there and listened as the youth pastor claimed he was wrong, but the encounter was consensual. She wanted it too. Her face flushed and with her boyfriend by her side, she got some of her power back. “Liar!” she yelled from the back of the room.

I didn’t know about any of this, but I don’t know how I would have thought of it at the time. In our and many other church cultures, these types of indiscretions were to be handled within the walls of the building…certainly not out “in the world,” where no one would understand about true forgiveness (of the perpetrator) and how Jesus cleanses us of sin so we (they) can walk about as if we (they) were white as snow. Certainly, you would not ever get the police involved! They don’t offer redemption. That can only happen within the church. I wonder now if I would have thought any differently if I had known what was going on? I know from looking back that cognitive dissonance would have reared it’s head as usual, but would I have allowed it to change my thinking? I’m not sure. I know why I was like I was, but I feel regret to this day (forty plus years later).

Those incidents for Michelle are bad enough…but the next two youth pastors would also perpetrate on the innocence of those entrusted to them…teen boys and girls. Again, no police were informed. And I didn’t even hear the rumors. I was too busy trying to untangle my own personal mess…marriage to an abusive narcissist who was on staff at the same church. Running around to doctors who told me I needed a hysterectomy when what I really needed was a divorce. And around the same time a psychiatrist misdiagnosed me with bipolar disorder and put me on lithium. The lithium caused my thoughts to bounce around my brain like pinballs. He wanted to keep me on it anyway because there was always the danger that my brother and father had taken their lives due to undiagnosed bipolar disorder (his fear, not mine). Since this diagnosis was better than the one given to me by church counselors making $5 an hour (multiple personality disorder), I didn’t question it.

But even so…even so! I continued to try to find churches to attend wherever I lived! I thought there had to be somewhere I could attend where I and my kids would be safe. But if I thought that, I had another think coming.

Next: Some of the best and worst years were to come….