The former youth pastor’s path is the path of evangelical cultural failure.
A Tennessee megachurch pastor has resigned his position two months after admitting to sexual misconduct with a minor 20 years ago. It’s a striking turnaround from the original evangelical response to Andy Savage’s admissions in January, which included a standing ovation after he confessed to the incident during a Sunday sermon.
This week, Savage offered an unqualified apology for his behavior. “When Jules cried out for justice,” Savage said Tuesday, “I carelessly turned the topic to my own story of moral change… I now believe it’s appropriate for me to resign from my staff position at Highpoint Church and step away from ministry in order to do everything I can to right the wrongs of the past.”
Highpoint likewise issued a statement of apology, saying that it was “defensive rather than empathetic in its initial reaction to Ms. Jules Woodson’s communication” and that it would “develop a deeper understanding of an appropriate, more compassionate response to victims of abuse.”
The apologetic tone of Savage and his church alike heralds a long-overdue culture shift. Both Savage and Highpoint Church’s statements suggest that the evangelical community may be evolving, albeit slowly, on issues of sexual misconduct within the church, and may be more willing to look at sexual crimes as abuses of power, rather than shared sins of “temptation.”
Andy Savage became one of the faces of the evangelical church’s post-#MeToo reckoning when Woodson publicly accused him of sexually assaulting her when she was a 17-year-old high school senior attending the church, where he was her 22-year-old youth pastor.
After unsuccessfully trying to reach Savage by email, Woodson posted a full account of her story on an abuse survivors’ blog. According to Woodson’s account, Woodson socialized with Savage and others one night in 1998, Savage offered to drive her home. Woodson remembered Savage drove past her house, promising her a surprise — which she took to mean something innocuous, like ice cream. “I remember feeling special and excited, as in my mind, he obviously wanted to spend more time with me before taking me home,” Woodson writes.
Then he pulled into an isolated dirt road. Woodson writes:
Savage’s initial response to the incident characterized it as a regrettable sexual encounter, one in which both people behaved sinfully. In January, Savage told his Memphis congregation, Highpoint Church, in a live-streamed sermon, “Until now, I did not know there was unfinished business with Jules. Jules, I am deeply sorry for my actions 20 years ago. I remain committed to cooperate with you toward forgiveness and healing.”
His congregation responded with a standing ovation.
Later press coverage from the Washington Post, the New York Times, and others was less forgiving, and, in its wake, Savage’s forthcoming book on Christian marriage was pulled by Christian publishing company Bethany House, and he was subsequently placed on leave.
To his congregants, Savage had repented of the incident. He took the necessary steps to correct it, including telling his wife about it before their marriage, as he said in a later statement. He had sinned and committed an act of sexual impurity with another person, and he sought forgiveness from God as necessary, and through that forgiveness had been transformed. Although later media coverage prompted a backlash, the church’s immediate response to the accusation tells us something about evangelical culture.
Both the initial incident and Savage’s church’s early reaction to it revealed why #MeToo may have had difficulties in finding a footing in evangelical communities — even as Savage’s ultimate acceptance of responsibility, and that of his church, suggests that #MeToo may have had some success in reframing the discourse.
The events of nearly 20 years ago, and their aftermath, underscore how difficult questions of consent, power, and harassment are in a culture that views relationships through the paradigm of purity, forgiveness, and sin.
Woodson’s story — not uncommon in evangelical communities — is also the story of a community unused to thinking about sexual ethics outside of sexual theology.
Since the Savage case has come to national prominence, Woodson has spoken out about the ways in which evangelical church culture contributed to the trauma of her experience. In an interview with the New York Times, Woodson recalled how, when she was trying to report the incident, she felt church leaders minimized “the severity of what had happened. I was being blamed. It was in their eyes a consensual sexual sin… We as a church of all places should be getting this right. It’s unfathomable to me that the secular world, Hollywood…are taking a stand. The church should have been the first group to stand up and say we will not allow this.”
Understanding why it did not requires understanding the evangelical culture that shaped them.
As I have written previously, in many evangelical churches, questions of consent often come second to questions of purity and sinfulness. All sex (except for heterosexual marital sex) is considered innately sinful and to be avoided, and participation in it corrupts and contaminates both participants. In such a mentality, consent becomes all but irrelevant. Sex is as much about the participants’ relationship with God, as it is each other.
Often, such a mentality leaves women in the community without the agency to contextualize a sexual advance in a meaningful or nuanced way. Sex is either shared in loving marriage or an immoral and dirty expression of sin, rarely anything in the middle. For example, Woodson recalls agreeing to have oral sex with Savage, believing that his advances automatically proved that he “loved her.”
Woodson’s difficulty reporting the incident speaks to this dynamic. In her blog post, Woodson recalls there were initially no consequences to Savage’s actions. She reports telling her church’s associate pastor, Larry Cotton, about the incident. Cotton suggested that the incident might have been consensual. (Cotton has since been placed on leave from his post at his current church, Austin Stone Community Church, pending an internal review.)
Savage remained in a leadership role, moderating pro-abstinence events, among others. Only when Woodson spoke out in her female discipleship group some weeks later did the church address Savage’s actions by letting him go quietly and holding a going-away reception for him. According to Woodson, Savage was permitted to tell church-goers that he only “made a poor decision and that it was time for him to move on from our church.”
Writing in New York magazine earlier this year about her evangelical upbringing, Dani Fankhauser recalls a similar mentality in her community: how she was unable to dissociate her teenage sexual feelings from a boy from a certainty that God had planned for her to marry him. “When a Christian dating book, When God Writes Your Love Story, began making the rounds among my friends,” Fankhauser writes, “I thought, he already has.”
Likewise, while the pastors to whom Woodson told her story cast doubt on her credibility because she didn’t say “no,” it’s important to remember that, within the evangelical community in which Woodson grew up, female submission — particularly to authority — was (and is) seen as a virtue to be prized. To be obedient and to be submissive, especially to male authority figures, is — in most evangelical communities— a de facto virtue.
While this does not automatically strip any woman in that community of her agency, of course, the culture can create an environment in which young women and men alike aren’t given the tools necessary to conceptualize, let alone practice, consent-driven sexual behavior.
