The Trouble with Lynching (Harvey Weinstein, Silence Breakers, and the #MeToo's)

I am the son of a woman who was abused and mistreated the majority of her life. My mother was a woman who rotated from one bad relationship to another during my childhood. My stays with her were often basic survival. The physical and emotional abuse that she weathered made me literally want to kill a man when I was a boy. I can still recall images and sounds and emotions as clearly and vividly as if they happened yesterday. I would draw aggression from that dark place for significant stretches of my life until I met Jesus. To be honest, those experiences are something that the Lord continues to use to shape me by His grace. It is that formidable. As a result, to say that I have a very sharp and rigid sense of justice on those who abuse women would be an understatement. I had to call the cops as a kid just to keep my mother alive, so you might imagine how little sympathy I have for people who perpetrate such things.

I have entered the fray against a full-grown man with nothing but my little league baseball bat and raw instinct. This means something to me that maybe few can understand.

Let me take it further, I have two daughters now. There are things that change when a man has a daughter, much less two. I regularly think about things that would have previously been peripheral. The very thought that if someone assaulted or abused one of my daughters kicks into gear a righteous anger that is scary. My childhood not  withstanding, it is hard to know if I could throw the brakes on the rage that would ensue if anything happened to one of them. The person who would dare such a thing had best hope the police find them first, because I am from Southeast Oklahoma and there are too many places they would never find your body. Not to mention, I only know a small militia of rednecks who have built their whole lives around handling such situations. I am pretty sure they invented the tag, “Crimes of Passion” for just such an occasion.

I can barely think about a good Christian dude marrying my daughters one day, so the thought of someone hurting them or sexually assaulting them takes me to a place that is beyond reckoning, beyond reason.

As the #MeToo phenomenon began to sweep the twitter-sphere, as Harvey Weinstein became a familiar part of the constant news cycles, and as Time Magazine named the Silence Breakers their persons of the year, it did not necessarily surprise me. The Bible is not silent on this subject. The law says that a man is under the death penalty for raping a woman (Deut. 22). There are examples within the narrative of the Bible that has instances of assault that are clearly cursed by G-d (2nd Samuel 13). Warfare has ensued as a result of a man assaulting a woman (Gen. 34). Some think the Bible should not have any accounts of rape, but I remind you that the Bible is written about the real world with real people who happen to be real sinners like us.  Furthermore, the Gospel teaches men that women are special, to be honored, and are to be loved (1 Peter 3, Ephesians 5).

The Bible explicitly calls men to lay down their lives for women like Jesus, not wickedly take from life from them like Satan.

Here is another angle: I pastor people. I have had a front row seat to the train wreck of sin that people have done to one another. I have told people that ministers have an up close and personal experience with the best and worst that humanity has to offer. If you cannot deal with the deepest depths of human depravity and not flinch, then this is not the gig for you. You are unable to live in a bubble where you don’t see sin cursing every pocket of your community, at least not if you are doing it right. I have listened to tragedy after tragedy, wept from deep in my guts, and tried in humble moments to shepherd broken people as best as the grace to me allows. I have the worst and the best job, I have the most meaningful and the most terrible vocation and I have no intentions of doing anything else, but the faces I have seen makes this hard to write. It is not a philosophical or political debate to me nor to the broken people caught up in it.  

All that being said, I find myself dealing with another tension that has bubbled to the surface within me.

The conflict I have with Harvey Weinstein situation, the #MeToo hurricane, and the countless other accusations flying around is that I never stopped to consider whether each and every one of them is undoubtedly true. At first it is repulsive to think otherwise. Such questions can easily be interpreted by others as insensitive at best or a part of the problem at worst. Many would not dare to even broach the subject for fear the online moral police might deal out some form of retribution. Yet, the question of whether those being accused are being given due process in service to justice is a question that haunts me. Or is simply an accusation is enough to make one guilty. I thought this because it occurred to me that Social Media is the new lynching. You can destroy one’s character and undercut their ability to feed their family with nothing more than a tweet. A friend told me that he hears it's the new tar and feathers. There is something dangerous about that. In my very biased perspective, it never occurred to me that if it was me or someone I know that was being accused that I would want there to be conclusive evidence.  Lets just agree that social media is not the best source of conclusive evidence or balanced thinking. This is not to say that we do not hear the voices crying out, but that courts of law are better places to judge people’s innocence than the middle of an angry mob. The courts of man may not be the greatest place in the universe to find justice, but they are significantly better than those unlawful kangaroo courts that mobs form online.  

Social media has become the new way that a mob can lynch a person. What is the shaming of a person who disagrees with our outrage if not a mob mentality? If we simply allow Facebook outrage to determine someone’s guilt or innocence then we have become the very same injustice we hope to answer.

Here is the flip side of the coin for me; while I have two daughters, I also have two sons.  If someone accused my sons of something so heinous and potentially life altering, would it not be fair for me to ask that they be given a trial before Facebook decides their fate? Is it unreasonable to demand that people withhold their verdict until all the evidence has been gathered and the testimonies of witnesses have been weighed? In the Bible there is not just accounts of people sinning by sexually assaulting others, but also by falsely accusing people of sexual assault (Gen. 39). Joseph literally ran away from a woman who tried to bed him and still ended up in jail. If we lived in a world where false accusations were not even possible then there would be less conflict with the mob justice we seek. The problem is that our world is much more complicated. Thus entered my conflict. But it is good to remember that not all conflict is unhealthy. I would argue that if I allowed my childhood predisposition to skew my judgment of others such that everyone accused is automatically guilty then that would be a bad thing.

It would eventually mean that in the course of time an innocent person would be punished for crimes they did not commit (Enter comments about that one Netflix show).

On the other hand, if my sense of sympathy for those being lynched on social media causes me to immediately think that those who come forward and break the silence are mostly making their stories up then that is equally terrible. I would be adding to the pressure that discourages victims to come forward, thus aiding those who committed the crimes to evade justice. There are victims of sexual abuse that are in hiding because they fear the consequences of speaking out and that makes me sick. There are also individuals in jail or who have had their marriages, careers, or social lives ruined because someone “bore false witness” and falsely paint them a predator or pedophile. That too sickens me. 

No easy answers, but a very real conflict that we have to live within because of our broken fallen world. Someone will inevitably argue that one tension should be favored above the other in false hopes for a security or safe guard that simply does not exist. This is the danger we court in the Judges bench we form behind our computer screens. 

Last few thoughts then I will let you go try to enjoy the rest of the day that I probably just ruined. It is naïve to think that people are not having sex with other people at their workplace. The invitation to which is sometimes wanted and sometimes not. It is a reality that some people are going to use sex to advance themselves in certain fields and that is going to fall all over the spectrum of consensual. People in power, because of sin, are going to abuse that power in every way imaginable. People are going to use money and manipulation to exploit other people sexually. I think it would not take most people long to think of men and women who would not blink an eye at making up a story about another person if it was able to tear that person down while bringing the storyteller sympathy. It’s cliche but not untrue that we all “know that one person.”

I am not condoning these actions, but simply stating that the Bible is way ahead of us. It saw us coming. It saw the evil we bring into the world, long before we could call it what it is. In a very real sense, those fire and brimstone ministers that are hard to sit through were right about Hollywood long before the rest of us pagans had the slightest moral compass.

You do not have to be a historian to see that the Church has been modeling a more beautiful picture of sex than the 60’s ever conceived. Friend, G-d has not left us to the mob, but has shown us that all justice belongs to Him or it is no justice at all. At the same time he has loved us, the victims and perpetrators of injustice, such that we do not have to continue to live in the muck and mire of the sin we have done nor in the filth of the sin we have committed. I mentioned that are a part of my calling is to see the worst and that is true, but I have also seen the best. I have seen grace transform a person that has been crippled by sexual abuse. I have seen rape victims made clean by the Gospel. I have seen addicts and perverts and every other kind of broken person imaginable made into something new. I have seen freedom replace bondage; I have seen justice answer injustice. So while I am sobered by the reality that our world is far worse than any of us maintain, I am left with hope for the hopeless because of Jesus. I have a conviction that injustice will not get the last word; Jesus will. Crime will not go ultimately unpunished. I can put down my pitchfork because of that. The victims have a High Priest in Jesus who is their constant advocate. I can listen and play my role because of that.  There is a Prince of Peace who is turning conflict into glory.

G-d willing, because of Jesus I can live with balance despite my residence being an unbalanced world.