Issues around abuse

Dear Editor,

As someone who witnessed explicit sexual abuse at a Christian boys’ camp in my youth, I’m not entirely surprised at the degree of abuse of all kinds mentioned by Dr Langberg in the en interview with Rebecca Chapman (November 2022).

It’s not just in the church, of course, but in the BBC with Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris; the Rotherham scandal and Asian men; the whole Me Too movement; and of course it’s most shocking in the church – even the evangelical church!

Clearly, not being willing to believe or not rock the boat are issues that need to be dealt with and I can understand Dr Langberg’s answer to the question, what do you do when a friend mentions abuse, ‘Number one, say you believe them’. Now, in her books and other interviews she may well qualify that, but it would have been interesting if she had been asked if she had ever come across, in her long career, a false or exaggerated accusation.

I mention this because the Bible obviously takes false witness seriously and has a principle of corroboration – two or three witnesses. Not that long ago people were talking about False Memory Syndrome, Leon Brittan was falsely accused, and there were the Satanic panics involving churches and welfare services in the 80s and 90s (where children were separated from their parents), which were mostly discredited. Going further back to the 17th century, thousands were killed on the false charge of witchcraft. OK, the conditions for that – i.e. plague, war, famine and your children routinely dying – simply don’t obtain today. But we live at a time of misinformation at the highest level, in a culture where the malnourished think they are fat (anorexia), or people think they are the wrong sex (gender dysphoria), and where social media can say anything. So while agreeing with Diane Langberg – take any mention of abuse very seriously – in all the discussion about safeguards, let’s not forget the one about truthfulness.

Yours sincerely,
Ian Cooper By email