Scandal, harassment, and opportunity

Thanks to Ralph at Cliopatria, I learned today of Millard Fuller's resignation as president of Habitat for Humanity.

The allegations are depressingly familiar:

In a characteristic act of frugality, Habitat for Humanity founder Millard Fuller hitched a ride to the Atlanta airport with a female staff member to save the organization a $75 shuttle ride. That ride ended up costing him -- and Habitat -- a great deal more.

Allegations of "inappropriate conduct" during that drive last year led to Fuller's temporary banishment from the headquarters of the Christian home-building organization he and his wife, Linda, founded 28 years ago.

The allegations themselves are, by some standards, mild but still serious:

Habitat would not divulge details of the allegations, but Fuller told The Associated Press recently that Victoria Cross accused him of touching her on the neck, shoulder and thigh, and of telling her she had "smooth skin."

I am sad because Fuller is one of my heroes, has been for years -- along with folks like Tony Campolo, Ron Sider, Jim Wallis, Millard Fuller was a "practical evangelical" with a passion for God and justice.   Like others in leadership, sexual misconduct has brought him down -- but compared to the misconduct of his Christian brethren on the pentecostal right (Bakker, Swaggart, Crouch), Fuller's misdeeds are quite tame.

Sexual harassment has long been one of my passions.  Hah, did that get your attention?  No, I don't mean harassing itself -- I mean working to help men avoid behavior that can get them in heaps of trouble.  At times, I've thought seriously about trying to get a consulting business going, one that would work with businesses and non-profits to help create safer, more congenial working environments.  I know that there are others who do that consulting, but most of them are focused heavily on litigation prevention.  I'd like to go deeper, helping men explore their own anxieties and misconceptions about our contemporary cultural attitudes towards sexuality and appropriate behavior and language in the school and workplace.

I've done a few of these workshops already.  Two years ago, a good friend of mine who is a newly ordained Presbyterian minister (PCUSA) asked me to develop and co-lead a seminar on sexual harassment at Fuller Seminary (which is not named for Millard, of course.) The local presbytery (San Fernando? I can never remember how Presbys organize themselves) insisted that all PCUSA seminarians at Fuller complete a sexual harassment training.  My friend, who is a woman, wanted a man to co-lead the seminar.  We spent a few weeks developing a little curriculum and implementing it.

We spent most of a Saturday two springs ago in a large classroom at Fuller.  I gave them the legal definition of sexual harassment with all the buzzwords ("persistent", "unwelcome", "quid pro quo", "hostile environment"); my colleague gave them the PCUSA position.  After this dry beginning,  we looked at Scriptural images of healthy and unhealthy sexuality and boundaries.  (Lots of time on David.)  We prayed, drank coffee, asked questions.  We also had folks share their fears and their stories.   Many of the women shared stories of abuse at the hands of youth ministers and other clergy, many of the men shared their own discomfort at being trapped in what they saw as ambiguous situations.

After lunch, I spent some time with the guys, while my colleague took the women off into another classroom.  We had just an hour together to debrief the morning session, laugh and sigh and share some more.  What we talked most about were the gray areas -- the compliments, the emotional intimacies, the time alone with folks of the opposite sex.  We talked about accountability,which I think is the key principle here -- always having another man to whom you are accountable for your actions.  We talked about how difficult it was to set up accountability partners, especially for those of us who are teachers and pastors and accustomed to "being in charge" in our work settings.  We talked about lust; we talked about giving compliments; we talked about porn; we talked about what "realistic holiness" looked like.  It was very moving.  The day finished with each group sharing some of the highlights of their discussion with the other-sex people. 

It was a great experience; alas, my Fuller Seminary colleague has moved on, and I hear that no one has offered a similar seminar since.  Since I'm not a Presbyterian (I know it's hard to believe, reading this blog, but Calvinism has little appeal for Hugo), I can't lead that same seminar without pastoral oversight and participation.

In any event, I know that my own credibility in my field hinges on my reputation.  if that is true for me, it is even more true for my brothers and sisters in ministry, who face special temptations.   And I do think God may be calling me to do some more work in this area.  I'm putting this out there because it has been a dream of mine for a couple of years now, and I've been procrastinating about getting anything done in terms of putting together a real plan for a consulting operation.  I know I'd be in it primarily as an act of service (though money would be nice), and I'd be especially interested in targeting non-profits, schools, and churches.   

I've got some free time in January.  Maybe I can take a few days and bang something out on the computer, and see if I can't get the ball rolling a bit.

Comments

[Maureen]

Your program sounds excellent, and I wish you the best of luck in getting it started. Hopefully the Schwyzer Sexual Harassment Seminar will spread across the country!

[Lawrence Krubner]

If you'd like to go into more detail here, in public, please do. On the one hand, a workshop that goes over stuff like compliments and appropriateness sounds interesting. On the other hand, I'm wondering if there is enough of a concensus (away from what the law says) about what is appropriate for there to be much to teach other than "Be careful. Be very, very careful. Don't touch, don't compliment, don't act casual, don't ask her to join you for a cup of coffee at the diner, don't do anything. Be careful."

[rudy]

i'd like to see you write out the Schwyzer S.H.S How To, er, uh, no that's not it, preventing it...

but really, this is valuable... please do write and share... or maybe we'll finally meet in person and talk about this and other topics???

[Hugo]

Yes, Rudy, we'll get together. January will see me with lots of free time. And I am going to work on some serious proposals -- hold me to it.

[mythago]

[i]don't ask her to join you for a cup of coffee at the diner[/i]

This isn't so much as being careful as recognizing a social norm. "Want you and me to go out for coffee?" is generally recognized as "Would you like to go on a date?"

[zuzu]

Yeah, somehow, "Let's go grab lunch" is different than "Let's go get coffee."

[Hugo]

Well, Rudy is a man... I suspect Kafi can handle it if I ask him out to lunch.

[La Lubu]

Must be a California thing....here in Illinois, coffee is coffee. Dinner is date.

[Jonathan Dresner]

In a lot of places "coffee" is a mini-date, because it can also be a non-date.....

[La Lubu]

Hmm...do you think that's related to the cultural level of alcohol intake? Here, drinks (meaning alcohol) after work would be the mini-date; coffee is what you go for when you want there to be no misunderstanding that it's a "just friends" outing.

I don't mean that to sound like we're all a bunch of lushes out here in the boonies (lol!), but that maybe there are fewer drinkers in Cali, so coffee is more serious!

[zuzu]

I think it's because dinner is a heavy-date thing, and lunch can be businessy. Breakfast can have different connotations, depending on where you spent the night before. Brunch is relaxed. Drinks is clearly a date. But coffee is a scoping-you-out kind of thing that's lower-pressure than either drinks or dinner.

In fact, there's a cafe here in New York called Drip that's got it's own dating service. You either look through entries at the cafe or you make your first contacts online and meet up at Drip or one of their affiliated cafes.

[zuzu]

Crap. I mean't "its" own dating service.

[Greg Robie]

I stumbled onto your blog when doing some reviewing of the controversy Millard and Habitat seem to be weathering. About 35 years ago I, and my 5 speed bicycle, hitched a ride with Millard and Linda in their station wagon from DC to Koinonia as part of a bicycle trip I was on at the time--but that is another story.

The comments that have been made so far in this thread are not, from my experience, very deep nor enlightening. If you are looking to take the sexual harassment discussion to a deeper and/or safer level--for men or women--I suggest reviewing the role stress plays in human sexuality in the context of the differences between the sexes relative our neuroendocrinology, how we process stress, and what constitutes the feeling of intimacy.

I recommend Candace Pert's book, _Molecules of Emotion_, the UCLA study "Biobehavioral Responses to Stress in Females: Tend-and-Befriend, Not Fight-or-Flight", Taylor, Klein, Lewis, Gruenewald, Gurung, and Updegraff (Psychological Review. Vol. 107 July 2000), and if you haven't seen it yet, the movie "What The Bleep Do We Know", as a baseline for engaging in new thinking relative to this subject.

Socially, we are in a place of transition where we cannot solve the problems we have created by using the same thinking we engaged in when creating them! To the degree that language is a shared representation of what is commonly understood, we are basically without a language in attempting this conversation. There are such discreet differences in thinking involved in our sexual/social interactions that virtually no meaningful language exists for a significant segment of humanity which can inclusively communicate across the differences. If one is to take the sexual harassment conversation to a safer level, the context of the conversation must change.

Such a change, unfortunately, is all about power. Since humans are reticent to give up power, this change is neither easy, nor safe . . . but it is needed.

=)
Greg

[sara]

I think that Habitat for Humanity is a great thing do you have any experience working for habitat for Humanity?

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[detox]

Millard Fuller's resignation as president of Habitat for Humanity.

The allegations are depressingly familiar:

In a characteristic act of frugality, Habitat for Humanity founder Millard Fuller hitched a ride to the Atlanta airport with a female staff member to