“I was involved in inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady in a home where I was staying. It was kissing and petting and not intercourse, but it was wrong. This behavior happened on several occasions over the next few years.” So says Gateway Church pastor/Trump spiritual advisor Robert Morris.
Morris, a megachurch superstar pastor, made the confession after the victim, Cindy Clemishire, recently went public. So it’s not like he was trying to do right by admitting his sin, it was just the usual CYA play. And not even true: as Fred Clark (and others) have pointed out, Clemishire was 12. That’s not a “young lady.” And she says “he did touch every part of my body and inserted his fingers into me,” which is a little more than “kissing and petting” implies. Morris makes it sound like some kind of forbidden love; “abuse” is closer to the mark.
I doubt this is a case of “power corrupts” — as writer Robert Caro put it, “power reveals.” Morris found himself in a position where he could indulge his desires, and those desires were indeed revealed. Contrary to Gateway Church’s denial that they knew about this when they hired Morris, Clemishire says she revealed the abuse to them too. They did nothing.
As Cato’s Letter a couple of centuries back put it, wickedness can flourish in any station unless we make it unsafe in any station. In Caro’s terms, we don’t know what wickedness might be revealed once someone gets the power to indulge it, or when they figure out the rules, the unwritten rules and what they can get away with.
Once wickedness starts flourishing it’s very, very hard to put it back in the bottle. In the 1990s, disgraced televangelist and convicted scamvangelist Jim Bakker admitted he’d sinned, had extramarital affairs and abused his pastoral office for personal gain. Two decades later he’d gone from apparently sincere repentance to painting himself as a cancel culture victim and hawking miracle cures and conspiracy theories on his show. The lure of religious celebrity and easy money was too much to resist.
Robert Morris seems to have suffered similar weakness. Morris’ statement to Gateway says that after it happened he confessed to his then-church, Shady Grove, and to Clemishire’s father. They asked him to step away from the ministry for two years and attend counseling, which he did. Except it appears he was lying: ““After a month of working nights as a security guard at Motel 6, I felt I had made great strides toward humility. I decided that perhaps I was ready to return to ministry.” That’s a quote from his book which refers to stepping away from Shady Grove over issues with pride, hence the “humility” reference.
I seriously doubt one month was enough to master his base impulses.
And that’s why, as Christian feminist Samantha Field once said, it’s not enough to trust sexual harassers or abusers to control themselves. The system they’re in has to take a stand and say no. It has to figure out what the organization did wrong that let the abuser get away with it: did they ignore warning signs or complaints? Did they decide the abuser was too valuable to take action (screenwriter Marti Noxon discusses encountering this in Hollywood)? Then fix the problem.
This isn’t easy — changing large organizations has been compared to teaching an elephant to dance — but it’s necessary. Setting new rules or benchmarks won’t do it if leadership doesn’t want to push change through: ““If your leadership lacks the requisite character and experience, no manual will help you. If you have the appropriate level of character and experience, no manual is necessary.”
That’s a problem with any organization. With right-wing churches it’s tougher because misogyny is part of their operating system. It’s easier to blame women for supposedly provoking men to rape than to blame men. After all, uncontrollable lust is part of being a guy: boys will be boys, men sleeping around is completely different from women doing it. If that masculinity occasionally crosses a line, punishing it would be an attack on men. NC Republican and wannabe governor Mark Robinson, for instance, dismisses charges against Roy Moore, Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein as some sort of feminist plot.
And so pastors prey and churches look aside. Or embrace them. No wonder they’re cool with Trump. Perhaps, as Fred Clark says, we should start posting the 10 Commandments on the walls of mega-churches. It seems pastors need it more than schoolkids.
For more examples of misogynist bullshit and double standards, read Undead Sexist Cliches, available as a Amazon paperback, an ebook and from several other retailers.
