Pathways for Leadership
Uplifting Women’s Voices and Challenging Male Misconduct
by Cassandra Lawrence & Wendy Goldberg
The selected text below is from a previously published chapter, Pathways for Leadership: Uplifting Women’s Voices and Challenging Male Misconduct by Rev. Cassandra Lawrence and Wendy Goldberg, in the book of collected essays, With the Best of Intentions: Interreligious Missteps and Mistakes – Edited by Lucinda Mosher, Elinor J. Pierce, Or N. Rose, Orbis Books 2023. You can learn more about the book here.
For Hagar, Sarah, Tamar, Dinah, Deborah, Vashti, Esther, Phoebe, Rahab, and the many women from those times through today who are left unnamed or cut out of our religious, cultural, and interfaith histories.
It is the first thread in our tapestry of connections. In August 2018, both of us—eager for a safe space to discuss how multifaith communities can cultivate a culture of inclusivity—attended a global gathering for grassroots activists and interfaith peacebuilders focused on skill building, networking, and organizing. While we didn’t actually meet each other there, this conference set a series of events into motion that would bring us together over the question of whether the interfaith movement was willing to hold an interfaith leader accountable for his harassment and abuse of women in pursuit of that safe space.
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In the intervening six years, we have found strength—with each other and with other women who are interfaith and religious leaders—in supporting one another more intentionally while creating a community of accountability. Our circles of care and knowledge help us identify issues and fortify our solidarity while we find ways to support those hurt by sexual harassment and discrimination. We discuss the emotional and physical consequences of the trauma of these experiences and the profound impacts. We support one another as we speak up when we see wrongdoing and support all affected by these situations. Our circles of care have named missteps and mistakes of the interfaith movement, both in private and publicly. Here are some of our collective insights.
The story and events that brought us together are not unique. There are abusers among us whose names are passed along the whisper networks, warning interns, volunteers, and new staff to protect themselves. In public, some of the names of people who are abusive are treated as sacred talismans, signaling membership within an elite circle of male privilege, leading to the highest religious authorities and funding streams.
Knowing these men can guarantee entry to top global meetings. These men are far too often seen as beyond accountability, because to connect the secrets whispered to the public persona is to guarantee loss of access to that cadre of relationships. In a field built on relationships, we are told we cannot risk losing or threatening one of these elite if we want to keep our professional and organizational status.
Each of us and the others we know have attended meetings where the all-male panel is seen as normal and desirable. When women are on panels, too often they are invited at the last minute and chastised for speaking equally to the men. We have attended meetings where women’s contributions are categorized only within the stereotypes of virgin, mother, and deviant or designated as secretaries, caterers, and childcare workers, withdrawing our agency and dignity.
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We have attended meetings where women are told to cover up, to be more religious and quiet, to pray more, and speak less. Sometimes we’re told the space is only for people who are ordained or hold some religious authority; yet, there seems to be an ever-growing list of excuses for exclusion of ordained women. Some people wield their positions of religious authority abusively. They harm, harass, and discriminate against the vulnerable among us. When women are Black or Brown, are Muslim, or of a Dharmic or Indigenous religion, their exclusion is even starker.
The whisper network is never fast enough nor broad enough to protect the vulnerable. It creates the impression that it is up to us as individuals to protect ourselves, because these elite men’s reputations, and interfaith engagement, more broadly, are more important than our individual dignity and safety. The whisper networks are never sufficient because they rest on fighting through the shame and doubt to speak to an even closer confidant. Responsibility rests on close confidants to reach out to one another to warn others. Interfaith networks and organizations are presumed not strong enough to withstand scrutiny or accountability.
Interfaith leaders are often unaccountable to any particular agency. Clear channels of accountability are nearly nonexistent in an industry largely led by volunteers, organizations with a small staff, and a cadre of individual leaders who are selected by their religious communities, or self-appointed, to engage in interfaith work. This lack of clear channels means we don’t know whom to trust when seeking support after being harmed.
This isolation can be as painful as the abuse, in a space where connection and bridges are held so highly. Keeping these secrets and subverting public accountability measures with nondisclosure agreements eat away at the very foundation we seek to create in interfaith engagement.
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Accountability channels and codes of conduct are only as strong as the people who know and follow them. Too often, accountability channels are hidden behind layers of shame and doubt, mixed with a deep desire by the survivor not to harm the interfaith spaces we love—a desire reinforced through implicit and explicit narratives of fragility. The silence of others tells us that our silence is the preferred response to abuse—and if we can’t stay silent, we should probably leave.
Our dignity is not political. When we and countless other women— Black, Brown, Muslim, Indigenous, Dharmic, LGBTQIA+, and others—attempt conversations about experiences in interfaith spaces of gender harassment, abuse, discrimination, and racism, we are told “it’s too political,” that it doesn’t have anything to do with interfaith engagement, or that it will damage the movement. We ask people to divide our intersectional identities leaving integral parts of ourselves outside this sacred work.
We are told explicitly and implicitly that our experiences aren’t important. We are inviting our faith communities to remember that justice is intimately connected with wholeness, healing, and belonging. When we pursue these ideals, we create the very pluralism we strive toward in our movement.
It is time to build transparent survivor-centered accountability and create spaces for abuse to be known, for healing, repentance, and justice to exist together finally. Shutting down conversations about sexual harassment and discrimination does not stop the abuse from happening. It simply means that we can’t see our common struggle for women’s leadership, equity, and dignity that already exists across religious worldviews. Accountability measures and codes of conduct are baseline measures.
We must amplify our collective narratives of women’s dignity and leadership. We are told that the differences in how women are able to hold leadership reflect different religious worldviews. Yet, when we start digging, we discover groups within every religious community supporting survivors of sexual harassment and abuse. They are working to hold accountable the leaders who committed the abuse and or covered it up.
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These circles uplift each other, celebrate each other’s wins, especially when they’re cut from the official record, support each other in negotiating for a place at the table, and work together to bring others to every table. This network of faith-rooted survivor support and advocacy groups is leading the way for interfaith spaces to support survivors and transform our culture of discrimination and silence.
We are working to create a movement of interfaith relationships based on one another’s full humanity. We are learning the names of those who were erased from public records, who were silenced, and who were loud. We are finding the history of women who built the interfaith movement, who are building the interfaith movement. We are challenging the idea that the interfaith relationships we are building should be based on access to power and funding. We are learning to build relationships based on longings for trust, healing, and justice. We are striving to build an interfaith community capable of integrating the full humanity of women, and thus embracing the fullness of humanity.
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