Interview: Karen Guth

Tainted Legacies: John Howard Yoder, Confederate Monuments, Georgetown University, and More

I’m excited to present to you the first Window Light interview in several months: my conversation with Karen Guth, an associate professor of religious studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. We discussed her recent book The Ethics of Tainted Legacies: Human Flourishing after Traumatic Pasts, which discusses the ethical problem of people or institutions that have made important contributions to society but that are found to have committed, or been complicit in, great evils. Dr. Guth and I spent a lot of time discussing the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder and the sexual abuse he committed, as well as the response of his church, academic institutions, and fellow theologians, because considering how to address the tainted legacy of a major theologian seemed particularly important for a newsletter with a theological focus. But we also discussed figures from the entertainment industry like Bill Cosby and Woody Allen, the removal of Confederate monuments, and the efforts of Georgetown University to address its historical involvement in the institution of slavery, among other things.

In our conversation, Dr. Guth and I only touched on several topics of particular concern for Catholics, like the ongoing case of the Jesuit artist Marko Rupnik, the recently revealed sexual and spiritual abuse committed by Jean Vanier, the founder of the L’Arche communities, and the sexual abuse of young boys by Fr. Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, among others. I hope my interview with Guth can spur a conversation about how the ideas from her book could be applied to these and other cases, so share your thoughts in the comments!

Just so readers know, about six minutes into the interview, there are some fairly explicit descriptions of sexual violence, provided in the context of explaining the violations committed by the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder, and these continue for about three minutes.

You can listen to the interview by clicking on the audio file below. The interview is about the length of a typical podcast, and you should be able to listen on your computer or phone. A full transcript of the interview is also published below for your reading convenience, along with some links and notes not available in the audio. (The transcript may be cut off in your email, but you should be able to click where it says “View entire message” to see the rest of the transcript.)

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Karen Guth

MATTHEW SHADLE: Hello, I'm with Karen Guth, the Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. And today we're going to talk about her recent book, The Ethics of Tainted Legacies: Human Flourishing after Traumatic Pasts. But before we get to that, though . . . Well, thanks for being here, Karen. Thanks for coming to talk to me.

KAREN GUTH: Thanks for having me.

SHADLE: So, before we talk about the book, though, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself?

GUTH: Yeah, sure. So, as you said, I'm an associate professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. But as you may be able to hear from my accent, I'm not from Massachusetts originally, I'm from Greenville, South Carolina. And that's where my interest in religion really started, and it took me to study at a historically Baptist college, Furman University. And from there, I went on to study religion and literature at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. I was really interested at the time in biblical interpretation, and interpretation theory more generally. And then after that, I took my interest in religion to Harvard Divinity School, where I was very interested in studying religion and public life with Ronald Thiemann.

SHADLE: Oh, wow.

GUTH: Yeah. So, I took every class I could with Ron Thiemann. He was such a great teacher, and he really . . . I really shared a lot of the questions that he explored in his scholarship on the valuable role that religion plays in public life. And from there I went on to the University of Virginia where I did a PhD in religious ethics, studying with Chuck Mathewes.

SHADLE: Oh, okay.

GUTH: Do you know Chuck?

SHADLE: Oh. Not personally, but I know of him, yeah.

GUTH: Yeah. So, it was really at UVA where I realized that I was an ethicist, which kind of put together all of these different pieces, and actually, true to my progressive Baptist roots, I'm a Protestant social ethicist by training. So, that's the tradition that was founded in part by a Baptist minister named Walter Rauschenbusch, who's credited as being one of the founders of the Social Gospel tradition.¹

SHADLE: Oh, yeah.

GUTH: So, yeah. And I have special interest in feminist and womanist thinkers in the tradition of Protestant social ethics.

SHADLE: Okay. Yeah. And we're going to talk about that a little bit later, so . . .

GUTH: Yeah, exactly. So, that's my background, and I would say a lot of my work attempts to put feminists and womanists in conversation with some of the more dominant figures in the tradition to identify new trajectories for the field of Christian ethics. And that's how, actually, I came to study the theologian John Howard Yoder.² It was through my work, and in my first book, Christian Ethics at the Boundary.

SHADLE: Okay.

GUTH: But I’d say another, larger concern that I have more broadly, just looking back on my work, is that it seems like I've always been interested in what I would call the ethics of theological legacies. So, how theological legacies get used and deployed and appropriated.

SHADLE: So, sounds like closely related to the concept of tradition.

GUTH: Yeah. Exactly.

SHADLE: Yeah. So . . . But before we jump in, I wanted to say I'm also from the South. I'm originally from Arkansas, although . . .

GUTH: Oh, cool.

SHADLE: My . . . whatever accent I ever had mostly faded away. Although it comes out every once in a while, but . . .

GUTH: Yeah. Well, I mean, I've lived all over the world, and I've lived outside of the South longer than I have in the South. But everyone always asks me . . . You know, as soon as I start talking, someone always says, “Well, where are you from, exactly?” So, I know I still have a little bit of the accent with me.

SHADLE: Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I just did the math. I'm the same. I've lived outside of Arkansas longer than I lived there.

Okay. Well, let's jump back in. And you alluded to this already. So, we'll talk about exactly what you mean by a tainted legacy in a little bit. But your interest in that topic was in part spurred by when you became aware of the sexual abuse that had been committed by John Howard Yoder, the Mennonite theologian. So, I've got, you know, a two-parter here. So, for any listeners who may not be fully aware . . . And, as you talked about in the book, that's one of the issues here, isn’t it? You know, knowledge of this was slow to seep into the public. Can you describe in general terms what Yoder was guilty of doing, but also about . . . You know, a huge part of the issue here was the institutional response that allowed it to persist, allowed him to, at least for a good while, avoid responsibility or consequences. And then the second part is, then, more personal. Tell us . . . You talked about it in the book. So, tell us the story about how you became aware of this and how it affected you in your development as a theologian.

GUTH: Yeah, sure. So, I think to answer the first question, for the sake of accuracy, I'd like actually to just read some excerpts straight from the source.

SHADLE: Okay.

GUTH: Which is Rachel Waltner Goossen's article “‘Defanging the Beast’: Mennonite Responses to John Howard Yoder’s Sexual Abuse.”³ This is an article that was commissioned by the Mennonite Church USA as part of a fact-finding process, of truth telling, around Yoder’s sexual abuse that came out in the Mennonite Quarterly Review in January 2015. So, if you'll bear with me, and I'll just read a couple of paragraphs where she describes the various violations that Yoder perpetrated.

SHADLE: Yeah.

GUTH: So. this is quoting from the article, beginning . . . Let me check here. Yes, page 10, moving on to 11. She says, quote:

“Precise numbers will never be known, but two mental health professionals who worked closely with Yoder from 1992 to 1995 as part of the Mennonite church accountability and discipline process believe that more than 100 women experienced unwanted sexual violations by Yoder. Others knowledgeable about the experiences of Yoder's victims cite more than fifty as a conservative estimate. Some who were victimized by him, as well as others knowledgeable about his activities, warned educational and church leaders about the dangers he posed. Administrators at Mennonite institutions who knew of Yoder’s sexual misconduct tended to keep decision-making close to the chest, a strategy of secrecy that resulted in information trickling out over a period of time. Yoder's advances included making suggestive comments, sending sexually explicit correspondence, and surprising women with physical coercion. Since Yoder’s death in 1997, additional women have come forward confirming evidence from his writings to Marlin Miller and other confidantes that Yoder’s activities ranged across a spectrum from sexual harassment in public places to, more rarely, sexual intercourse. Some women found his sexual aggressions to be relatively inconsequential in their lives. Other women's experiences were devastating, with trauma exacting a steep toll on marriages and careers.”

I'm skipping now to a last paragraph that I'd like to read on page 12:

“One of the oddest phrases in Yoder’s memo to Miller was ‘the “defanging” of the beast.’ The purpose of his exploratory sexual activities, Yoder explained, depended on the needs of a given woman. Often, he intended ‘to confirm the safeness of closeness by demonstrating non-arousal.’ At other times, he wanted to help the woman he was with ‘overcome the fear/taboo feeling due to simple ignorance of anatomy.’ Or, in the less-frequent instances when Yoder engaged in what he called ‘partial/interrupted arousal,’ he did so to confirm to the woman—the object of his experimentation—that the ‘“defanging” of the “beast” is really safe.’ In subsequent discussions with Miller and others at Goshen Biblical Seminary, Yoder defined his activity of ‘partial/interrupted arousal’ as genital penetration without ejaculation. By ‘defanging the beast,’ he explained, he meant that he wanted to teach a woman who had expressed fear of sexual relations that what he called ‘familial intimacy’ was demonstrably safe and not coerced—that is, not rape.”

Okay, so, I've read that just to be as accurate as possible . . .

SHADLE: Sure.

GUTH: About what the authorities on this issue say is the case in terms of his violations. But, as Goossen also points out, and as I highlight in my work, as well, the violations extend beyond the sexual violence, right? Yoder managed to be perpetrating these actions over the length of his entire career, right? So, he was using his intellectual gifts and his power and status as a leading Mennonite figure to facilitate his abuse, to silence his victims, and to evade censure in his Mennonite communities and his academic communities. So, there are a variety of different kinds of harms and violations at issue here.

SHADLE: Sure. Okay, and so then did you want to say more about how the . . . how, at least at first, how the institutions responded?

GUTH: Yeah. You mean the Mennonite institutions?

SHADLE: Yeah.

GUTH: Yeah, well, I would highly recommend Goossen's article for more information on this. But, I mean, as I said, he managed basically to convince the president of the seminary that he was doing something legitimate. And I think the institutions were aware that he was doing things that were not appropriate and that were violations of others in the community. But they were more concerned with safeguarding Yoder’s reputation and the status that his reputation had garnered them as an institution, so it was a lot more concern for the protection of the institution than there was for those he was violating.

SHADLE: Yeah. And so, for Catholic listeners, you know, there's a lot in this case that should be familiar from cases within our community. So, you know, on the one hand, and part of what makes Yoder’s case so complex, is that the sexual abuse was intertwined with his role as a theologian and with his spiritual leadership within the community, and so we've had cases like Jean Vanier,⁴ the leader of the L'Arche community, who, you know, did similar sorts of things.

GUTH: Yeah.

SHADLE: Or the artist Marko Rupnik.⁵ But then also the focus on protecting people's reputations or the institution rather than pursuing justice. So, okay.

GUTH: Yeah, definitely. And I would add to that, that, you know, Yoder taught at the University of Notre Dame until his death in 1997.

SHADLE: Well, right. Right. There’s that. There’s that, too.

GUTH: So, there's also that tie in, as well. This wasn't just a Mennonite or a Mennonite institution issue. And the other thing, too, is, I mean, I think that the Jean Vanier comparison is really apt because, although it wasn't at first widely recognized, because a lot of these memos and things were unpublished, Yoder had written quite a bit about justifying what he was doing as an experiment in Christian sexual ethics, you know. So, on the one hand, people had this initial reaction like, “Oh, wow. Like, you know, the greatest known theorist of Christian pacifism in the 20th century is a serial perpetrator of violence. What do we do with that?” But the fact of the matter is, he actually saw these things as not being in conflict at all, but saw what he was doing as part of an experiment in Christian sexual ethics that he justified in writing, although a lot of those memos are unpublished. So, there's a lot of similarities, I think, too, between those two cases.

SHADLE: Yeah. Okay. So, then going to the second part. So, you wrote about how you learned about this. I believe it was at an academic conference. Is that right?

GUTH: Yeah.

SHADLE: Can you give us the details?

GUTH: Yeah. So, yeah, I . . . You know, in graduate school, I was introduced . . . This is at University of Virginia. You know, I was introduced to Yoder that way, through the literature on war and peace. And I was thinking about using Yoder in my dissertation, which I did, actually. I wrote a dissertation comparing Reinhold Niebuhr,⁶ John Howard Yoder, and MLK’s views on violence, and trying to think about how to move beyond their positions by incorporating feminist and womanist thought. So, I had been starting to do a little bit of work on Yoder as part of my graduate studies, and I had the opportunity, I think it was in 2007 . . . I was presenting my very first conference paper as a graduate student, and it was a paper comparing John Howard Yoder and the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer's⁷ views on violence. And at the very end of my paper, a woman in the audience, a colleague of mine who I wish I knew who it was . . . I mean, at that time, I didn't even know who anybody was, you know?

SHADLE: Yeah.

GUTH: I was just a baby. But she said to me, you know, she raised her hand and said, “How can you give a paper on John Howard Yoder's pacifism, given his sexual violation of women?” And I was just shocked. I mean, no one had said anything to me about this. I had studied the secondary literature on Yoder pretty well, I thought. There had been no mention of this. I mean, you’d think there’d be some kind of acknowledgement, right, of this kind of . . . of the gravity and severity of his sexual violence somewhere?

SHADLE: Mmm hmm.

GUTH: So, I was just totally shocked, and I'm sure I answered the . . . I don't know what I said, but I'm sure I answered her very badly because I was just so flabbergasted. You know, and after the conference, I really . . . I felt like it was an indictment of my work. Like, I thought, how did I miss this key feature, you know, of Yoder’s biography. And I went back to all the secondary sources I could find, and there was no mention of anything about sexual violence. I found one vague reference in an edited volume by Mark Thiessen Nation and Stanley Hauerwas of some kind of disciplinary procedure happening at the church. Didn't say why or what it was, or for what. And then there was also, like, a later . . . Much later, I found like a little paragraph from the Christian Century about Yoder’s ministerial credential to be revoked for some reason. But there was still no actual acknowledgment of what he had done. And so, you know, I thought to myself, what's going on here? Like, this seems like a justice issue in and of itself, that there's no truth telling or transparency around this aspect of this person's biography, let alone how it might lead us to think about, you know, his work, or the Peace Church tradition, or the problem with sexual violence, or any of the other related questions that are there.

SHADLE: Yeah, and you talked about how theologians who were relatively close to Yoder, or influenced by Yoder, did take different responses once this became more well known, and so, like, for example, the woman at the conference, you know, would seem to be expressing the view that his work should be, for the most part, just, you know, removed from the conversation, right? But . . .

GUTH: Yeah. You know, I mean, I don't know. That could have been her. She was at least raising the question . . .

SHADLE: Yeah, raising the question.

GUTH: Of how we should think about these things

SHADLE: Yeah, that’s fair.

GUTH: You know, of a piece. I suspect that maybe she was coming from what I call an Abolitionist perspective, but I don't know for sure because she didn't actually make that claim. But yeah.

SHADLE: So, what were some of the other responses from relatively well-known theologians?

GUTH: Oh, there were all kinds of responses, and this is in part what kind of led to the development of the typology . . .

SHADLE: Right.

GUTH: That I offer about responses to what I call tainted legacies. Because I started to notice the various ways that people were responding to Yoder’s legacy basically mapped onto the types of responses that folks had to all kinds of other questions like . . . You know, like, what do we do with medical knowledge that's unethically obtained, or how do we think about Martin Heidegger's Nazism.⁸ And all the types were there. So, with Yoder, you know, you had some colleagues, and I would say, even to this day, I continue to see folks who will cite Yoder with no mention of sexual violence. Those are folks that I call “Deniers.” They're not willing to acknowledge or pay enough attention to the violations that are there. There were plenty of people that were like, “Well, Yoder may have been a really bad person, but he's a great theologian.” You know, that's what I call the “Separationist” response, where it's like we just have to kind of set aside these things he did in his, quote, unquote, “personal life” and think about the quality and contributions of his theology.

SHADLE: Yeah. And like we talked about, that's really impossible in his case because his work and his actions were so closely connected.

GUTH: Exactly.

SHADLE: Yeah, there's . . . But even in other cases where there's not that tight connection, we'll probably get to it, but you find that separation unworkable, too.

GUTH: Yeah, for the most part. And then, you know, I think there were other people who were saying, “Well, now that we know this, we need to go back to his texts and see if we can't find problems there that we didn't notice before.” You know, that's a response I call the “Revisionists.”

SHADLE: Oh, and then there were those who argue that we need to look to women as the more . . . as the better articulators of Mennonite nonviolence, right?

GUTH: Yeah. So, this is a position that my colleague Marvin Ellison, I think, has really done the best job of articulating. At a later presentation that I gave where I told the story that I just told you about my very first academic presentation, I was really kind of raising these questions of how we think about, you know, how we move forward in light of all of the information we have, and Marvin Ellison articulated the view that, you know, basically, now we know who the real authorities on peacemaking and pacifism are. And it's the women who mobilized to end Yoder’s violence, to hold him accountable, and to begin to make reparations for what he'd done. I find that argument very, very compelling.

SHADLE: Mm hmm.

GUTH: There were other people too, who wanted to cite, you know, the fact that Yoder was a socially awkward person. I think some people, I think in a very well-meaning way, suggested that maybe he had Asperger's and that was somehow a response. I mean, there was all kinds of stuff said in response.

SHADLE: Yeah.

GUTH: A lot of it doesn't really make a lot of sense, but . . .

SHADLE: That seems like a variation of Denialism.

GUTH: Yeah, exactly. Because for me, part of . . . There are lots of different kinds of Deniers and, you know, one kind just doesn't acknowledge anything at all, but another kind tries to mitigate the violations with some kind of explanatory, you know, reason, and so I would put that kind of response into that category.

SHADLE: Okay. So, one of the things that . . . You beat me to the punch on this . . . But one of the fascinating things about the book is how you bring together cases or situations that on the surface don't seem to have a lot in common, but you bring them together under this umbrella of “tainted legacy”, so things like, what to do with Confederate monuments? Well, Bill Cosby. Like institutions of higher education that have some connection with slavery, like Georgetown University. And so on. So, what do you mean by a tainted legacy? So, how would you define it?

GUTH: Yeah. So, this is a great question. And I think it's one of the . . . It's something I see as one of the main tasks of the book, because when I started to think about Yoder's case, I was reading around in all kinds of different literatures, basically looking for resources to help me think about the dilemma that his case produces, and what I really found is that the idea of a tainted legacy, even though it's, you know, commonplace across the academy, public life, you know, human history, basically that no one had really theorized it yet in philosophical or religious ethics. So, one of the main things I try to do in the book is define a tainted legacy. And for me, a tainted legacy has four constitutive features. So, the first feature is that there's got to be some kind of indispensable good or contribution or influence here, otherwise we wouldn't have a problem, right? Because we could just . . . If it wasn't indispensable, we could just throw it out and not worry about it. The second thing is that whatever the indispensable good or influence or contribution is has been tainted in a serious way by trauma of some kind. So, in the book I used the widely recognized traumatic experiences of slavery, and the legacies of slavery, and sexual violence. The third thing is that tainted legacies always inflict what is another distinct form of trauma called moral injury or institutional betrayal.

SHADLE: Mm hmm.

GUTH: So, these are two separate concepts. Moral injury . . . I followed the definition of Jonathan Shay, who defines moral injury as a trauma that's perpetrated when one witnesses a legitimate authority betraying what's right in a high stakes situation.

SHADLE: Mm hmm.

GUTH: So, for him, it's a form of what he calls leadership malpractice. And then, also, there's a concept of institutional betrayal, which I see as moral injury on an institutional level. So, it's basically when a trusted institution does something to harm those who are dependent upon it. And then finally, the fourth feature for me is that tainted legacies always have what I call “remainders” . . .

SHADLE: Mm hmm.

GUTH: Which is, you know, like, say, for example in Yoder’s case, you have texts to deal with, you have a body of work there to deal with. With Confederate monuments, the monuments themselves are the remainders of the US's traumatic slave past. So, there's always a remainder there. And it couldn't . . . Sometimes it's a material object, other times it could be just practices that are handed down from the past, so it could be an immaterial thing, as well. But there always . . . They always serve as reminders of the original trauma, and they also represent deeper structural injustices that gave rise to the problem in the first place. And so, with a lot of tainted legacies, what you really see happening is, debate flares up around the remainder, you know, like texts.

SHADLE: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

GUTH: What do we do with Confederate monuments? That's how you know you’ve got a tainted legacy, for me, is that there's always some kind of remainder that's giving rise to fervent discussion.

SHADLE: And an example you give in the book that I think really shows how subtle this idea of a remainder is, is that you give, for example, the case of Woody Allen, the director.

GUTH: Yeah.

SHADLE: And so of course one remainder is his films. But you also talk about, even if we destroyed his films or never watched them again or anything, he's had a profound influence on filmmaking that can't be eliminated . . .

GUTH: Exactly.

SHADLE: And so that's part of the legacy, too. And so, right, and . . .

GUTH: Exactly. That's actually why I theorized the problem in terms of legacies, right?

SHADLE: Yeah.

GUTH: Because this is actually the element of tainted legacies that most people, I think, ignore or neglect, which is that we're not just dealing with a thing that has to be dealt with. We're also dealing with generations of influence that can't be revoked.

SHADLE: Yeah. And then obviously we see the same thing with Yoder, too, like, you know, we can't take back his influence on, you know, our generation and the previous generation, right? So, I do want to quickly go back to moral injury, so . . . I don't think you mentioned it, but it's definitely discussed in the book. That's a concept that you're borrowing from the ethics of war, right?

GUTH: Exactly.

SHADLE: And the psychology of war. And I thought, you know, one thing I enjoyed was you did a good job of saying, “Okay, there are some specific aspects of dealing with moral injury for soldiers that don't carry over to other contexts,” and so you made that distinction, but you still thought the concept was valuable for people in other situations where they either have to make these complex moral decisions or they witness unjust decisions by people in authority.

Okay. So, we already talked about this a little bit, but you . . . So, once we know what a tainted legacy is, you create this typology of responses, and I think we've already talked about Denialism, you know, trying to explain the person or institution’s behavior away, you know, as if it's not a problem. And Separation, which is distinguishing . . . well, distinguishing the good they do from the evil they've done, so you know, distinguishing Yoder’s theology from his behavior, or, you know, distinguishing the Cosby Show from Bill Cosby the man, those sorts of things. But you list a few others, too, that you find more, at least somewhat more, adequate. So what are some of the other responses, and which do you think is the most adequate?

GUTH: Yeah. So, as I mentioned before, I really developed this typology . . .  I mean, in part, it's part of my argument about tainted legacies being a thing. Because when you look at all of these disparate cases that don't seem to have any connection, like you were mentioning before, one thing that you notice is that they all . . . There is this pattern of response, and so I would say this is in some ways . . .  The typology was another part of the argument about what constitutes a tainted legacy, because they tend to give rise to these different types across them.

SHADLE: Oh yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah.

GUTH: Yeah. So yeah, so you named the Deniers and the Separationists. There's another response that I call the Abolitionists. And they're really . . . Their main thing is to reject the authority of thinkers and institutions who have done horrendous things and to try to ban their remainders. So, these are the folks who want to say, “Well, we should just not teach Yoder’s theology anymore,” for example. Then I have two other types. One is the Revisionist. These folks are the ones who really want to go back and reassess and reinterpret the legacy in light of the new knowledge or awareness that folks have around the violations. And then I also talk about another type called the Redeemers. These folks are really trying to basically seek . . . They're seeking to salvage good from the ashes. You know, “What can we do to kind of make things as right as possible?” So, I think, like, memorial efforts in this vein, folks who want to teach the material for cautionary tale value. You know, the American Medical Association talks this way about using medical knowledge obtained unethically, like if it can literally save lives, we should do so.

SHADLE: Yeah, that's a good example.

GUTH: I lay out these responses, and then I advocate for my own constructive response, which I call the Reformer. For me, the Reformer, it incorporates elements of Abolitionism, Revisionism, and the Redeemer type, but it really moves beyond this question of what do we do with the remainders to focus on repairing the legacies themselves, but more importantly, the systemic injustices that produce them.

SHADLE: Mm hmm.

GUTH: So, in the case of Yoder, for example, the issue for me is not how do we repair Yoder’s legacy. The issue for me is, how do we develop a Peace Church tradition that actually combats sexual violence?

SHADLE: Mm hmm.

GUTH: That's the way a Reformer would approach this question. Rather than obsessing over this question of what do we do with Yoder’s texts . . . For me, that's an interesting ethical question, but it's not the most important ethical question.

SHADLE: Yeah. I . . . you know. if I had to reduce it down, that was one of my main takeaways from the book, that in these situations, we tend to become so focused on the remainders . . .

GUTH: Yeah.

SHADLE: You know, the statues or the artworks or, you know, whatever it may be, that we lose track of the background of how this happened in the first place, and so I really appreciated that. And, you know, I don't think you're saying that we can ignore the debates over statues or things because those are like . . . That's how . . . It's through these symbols, is one of the ways institutional structures are passed on and create meaning, but you're trying to broaden our perspective, like, don't get so obsessed with whether to tear down the statue or anything that you lose sight of the bigger issue. Does that sound accurate to you?

GUTH: I think that sounds right. Yeah. I mean, I do think that those are important questions. The questions of what to do with remainders are very important. I just don't think they're the only questions to ask, and they tend to be . . . they tend to become the focus. And then all these other things kind of fade out of view. And so, I wanted to say exactly as you said, that, well, the questions about remainders are important and we do need to think seriously about them. The bigger question for me is how do we prevent these violations in the future? And so, thus I turn to the more structural, systemic issues involved, as I would, as a social ethicist, because that's what we're concerned about.

SHADLE: Yeah.

GUTH: Yeah. But I would say, too, like all the positions . . . Like, even though I advocate for the Reformer position as being the strongest of all of all of them, they all have advantages and disadvantages, and so part of what I was trying to do with the typology is to show that there are advantages to this response and there are disadvantages to this response. And so even the Deniers, who, you know, that's the position where I would struggle the most to come up with an advantage. The disadvantages are really obvious. But, you know, there's even an advantage there, which is that some of the Deniers who want to be like, “Well, everything's tainted,” you know . . .

SHADLE: Uh huh.

GUTH: They at least have an insight into the power of human sin, right? I mean, there's something good there. So, the real task for me was not to say this is the right position or that's the wrong position, but to think ethically through the advantages and disadvantages of each type.

SHADLE: Yeah, yeah, there's that cynical version of the Denialist.

GUTH: Yeah, I mean, I encountered that a lot, which is like, “Well, everybody's done something wrong, so where does it stop?” And for me, I always say . . . Well, think about what I said, the second constituent of feature of a tainted legacy is. We're not talking about people who are jerks or, you know, being rude to your mom. We're talking about violations that rise to the level of trauma. Right? So, for me, that trauma piece does a lot of work in terms of thresholds. And that would be my response to Deniers who say, “Well, everything's tainted, what’s to be said?” You know.

SHADLE: Yeah, and well . . . And that idea that there are . . . That, you know, we can make judgment calls about a case kind of leads into my next question. And I don't know if this is a good question or not, but . . . So, you are . . . You know, like you said, you see value in each of the types, but the Abolitionist view, that we should just, you know, erase these tainted legacies or erase this person's work and influence, that, you know, you argue that it's not that simple. You know, like my example that I took from the book of Woody Allen, for example. But is there ever a case where the appropriate response is to, in a sense, banish a person or just shut down an institution because it’s . . . it or it's legacy is so tainted?

GUTH: Yeah, I mean that's a good question. I think the first thing that comes to mind for me, though, when you ask that is, what would that look like?

SHADLE: Yeah, yeah.

GUTH: I mean, there are all kinds of . . . I go immediately to the practicality of it or the pragmatics of it. I mean, I suppose you could make a symbol illegal, you know, like Germany has made the swastika illegal as a symbol.

SHADLE: Yeah.

GUTH: And yeah, I mean, that seems right to me. But the real problem here is that, as I point out with the Abolitionist responses . . . The strength for me of the Abolitionist response is that it shows appropriate censure of the wrongdoing and the people who've done, our institutions who have done, who have violated others. And it shows the most concern for victims because I think part of where that's coming from is, “Look, I'm not going to put Yoder on my syllabus out of concern for those who've suffered violence at his hands or sexual violence at the hands of anybody.” Right? So, there's kind of a real concern there for protecting people who've been violated. And I really admire that about the Abolitionist stance. The disadvantage of that, though, and I think this is where, you know, in response to your question, the disadvantage of, even if we could do that on a practical level, is it doesn't do anything to revoke the layers of influence and the legacies of formation that are there.

SHADLE: Yeah.

GUTH: So, you know, we could make racist symbols of all kinds illegal. Does that do anything to actually address the legacies of racism in the country? I mean, it does something, but it doesn't actually get at the root of a lot of the problems there. So, I think with Abolition, for me personally, I see Abolition working best as kind of a temporary measure. You know, I could see people saying, and I actually feel this way myself, “I'm not that inclined to teach Yoder’s theology anymore at all.”

SHADLE: Yeah.

GUTH: I mean, when I teach it, it actually is less about . . . I never teach him as like, you know, the authority on pacifism anymore. For me, he becomes kind of a case study in tainted legacies now. But I can see a lot of people saying, “Well, I just won't teach him for a while out of respect for those who he violated. “And, you know, maybe in time we can come back to it and have a more Revisionist response and more Reformist response. But, I do think Abolitionism is a really effective strategy, but for me, it's more of a temporary measure more than anything else.

SHADLE: Mm hmm. I'm going to interject a little bit about the Redeemer perspective.

GUTH: Yeah.

SHADLE: One example you give that shows its inadequacies was how it was applied . . . this response to the #MeToo movement.

GUTH: Yeah.

SHADLE: So, especially kind of early on when there were a lot of stories coming out of the entertainment industry, so like Harvey Weinstein being the most well known, probably. And so, I know you said this before, but the Redeemer approach is to kind of narrate this legacy in terms of something good coming from this evil.

GUTH: Yeah.

SHADLE: And one of the problems in those cases was that really, in addition to the sexual violence itself, were women's careers that never took off, right, all of this lost potential. You know, like . . . So, it's really hard to find the good in that, you know, and like you said, you know, the best this perspective could say is that, “Well, we can at least, you know, change the way some of . . . you know, casting, and hiring, and things function to avoid this in the future, and so that good will come from this terrible thing, these terrible things that have happened.”

And I was kind of wrestling with this perspective as I read, and actually an interesting case from the Catholic tradition is the case of the religious order of priests, the Legionaries of Christ. Their founder, Father Maciel,⁹ was found to have, I believe, sexually abused seminarians, maybe among other things, and yet members of that order of priests have continued to find meaning in their vocation, and the charism of that group. You know, they continue to have new vocations, you know, new members joining. And so, somehow the work he did in founding this group, people still experience it as bringing something good into the world that they want to be part of, even though there's definitely this tainted legacy based on the founder’s crimes.

GUTH: Yeah.

SHADLE: And so that's, you know, that's an interesting . . . I mean, I'm not sure what I think about that, but that's an interesting example of seeking redemption within a tainted legacy. So, do you have any thoughts about any of that?

GUTH: Yeah. I mean, it sounds like . . . I mean, I'm not familiar with the case you're referencing, but it sounds to me very similar to what I've heard people who are involved with L’Arche say, right?

SHADLE: Right, exactly.

GUTH: That they're just shifting attention to, or shifting focus from, you know, his sexual violations to the good that the organization he created does and continues to do.

SHADLE: Mm hmm.

GUTH: So, there's a little bit of a Revisionist move there . . .

SHADLE: Yeah.

GUTH: . . . in terms of shifting attention, but I think you're right, there's like . . . We could look at that and say, maybe that's an example of a kind of redemptive quality that persists in the legacy despite the violations. You were talking earlier about, you know, the generations of folks in the #MeToo movement, for example, that I bring up in my chapter on that, where I talk about the, you know, the art that's basically lost from the artists who have been abused by others. And it made me think, actually, of the point that Rachel Waltner Goossen brings up in her article on Yoder’s sexual violence, which is that there's a missing generation of Mennonite female leaders.

SHADLE: Uh huh.

GUTH: Right? And so, this is another interesting element of thinking in terms of legacy . . . Like, on the one hand, legacy enables us to think about how we can move . . . how we can redress violations in the past and move forward in a more positive direction. It also helps us understand the weaknesses of the Abolitionist response that we were just talking about in the sense that you can never revoke the generations of influence that carry on. But there's also the backward-looking element of the legacy, too, to say there's a missing generation of leaders, and artists, and important authority figures here because of these violations.

SHADLE: Mm hmm.

GUTH: So, the legacy piece, I'm just thinking again, I mean, it does a lot of work, I think, for me in terms of thinking through the various ethical issues that come up.

SHADLE: Yeah.

GUTH: I think that with the . . . Let me just say one last thing about the Redemption, or the Redeemer, approach. I think even when you're able to kind of identify redemptive aspects of a problematic or tainted legacy, I think the real . . . I mean, I like the Redeemer approach in that sense. Like, I think . . . I mean, if we can learn from past mistakes and if we can find some kind of redemptive element there, that's great. The problem with the Redeemer approach, though, is always this suggestion of a kind of redemptive closure, right?

SHADLE: Yes, yes, yeah.

GUTH: That, “Oh, well, we've made good on the past and everything's fine now,” which of course, you know, it's never that simple. So, I think that's the real drawback there. We tend to want to focus on the good stuff, and so when you say, “Oh, this legacy continues on despite the problems in the past,” like, it's just a little too easy, isn't it, to say, “Yeah, everything's fine now.”

SHADLE: Yeah.

GUTH: We've got the redemptive element there, so that's all that matters, and I think that's a real problem with that approach.

SHADLE: Yeah. There’s kind of an analogy with the problems of theodicy, right?

GUTH: Mm hmm.

SHADLE: Like, trying to, you know, tie everything up in a neat little bow and, you know, well, God permits evil so that good can come of it. You know?

GUTH: Exactly.

SHADLE: So, same kind of thing. Okay, so changing gears, another interesting thing you do in the book is you look at the approach that feminist and womanist theologians and biblical scholars have taken towards interpreting . . . Isn’t it Phyllis Trible who calls them “texts of terror” in the Bible?¹⁰

GUTH: Exactly.

SHADLE: And that's referring to, you know, passages that are explicitly about sexual violence, but also those passages in the Bible that have been used to, you know, justify the subordination of women or even violence against women. So, the ways they've wrestled with that, because that's something like a tainted legacy. And that . . . it's Scripture, right? You know, it's a sacred text that shapes, you know, generations of believers, and yet the need to take a critical eye at interpreting it and to, you know, challenge the ways those texts have been used. So anyway, in the book you want to borrow some of their methods as an analogy for how we can talk about tainted legacies in the present. And there is the difference in that these are sacred texts, so there are some complexities there that don't exist for, you know, Confederate monuments or things like that. But what did you see as the similarities?

GUTH: Yeah. So, I'm so grateful to you for noticing that dimension of the book, actually. Because, you know, I mean, the book's doing a lot of different things. I mean, it's diagnosing tainted legacies, theorizing them. It's trying to propose, or trying to analyze, common responses to them. It's putting forward my own constructive approach. But there's also an argument in the book where I'm trying to show the value of Christian feminist, womanist, and other liberationist discourses to the central kind of pressing moral problems of our time, right, and basically what I'm doing . . . I don't do it just in the one chapter where you're talking about . . . with the #MeToo movement, I actually do it in three different ways, through all three of my case studies. So, in each of the three case studies, the first one that you're describing is on questions that arose in the wake of the #MeToo movement about what to do with the texts of artistic authorities who are sexual violators. There's that case study. Also, in my Confederate monuments case study, I'm doing a similar thing. And also in the third case study, on educational institutions who are making reparations for slavery and sexual violence, I'm doing a different thing. Basically, I'm trying to show in each of these three cases there are analogues of these public debates in the history of the Christian tradition.

SHADLE: Uh huh.

GUTH: So, it's kind of like for Christians, we've already been there. We've already done this. We have rich traditions of thought that have reflected on versions of these questions in our own tradition, which makes total sense when you think about it, because the Christian tradition is itself a tainted legacy.

SHADLE: Mm hmm.

GUTH: There's a traumatic event at the heart of the Christian tradition, the crucifixion of Christ. The Christian tradition can be distorted and misused, through racism, sexism, etc., and all the same ways other traditions can, and one of the things that I'm trying to point out is that Christian feminists, and womanists, and liberationists are responding to a tainted legacy of their own.

SHADLE: Mm hmm.

GUTH: And so they have a lot of resources to offer in terms of thinking about these public discussions around tainted legacies. So, in the first case study, I'm really drawing on feminist and womanist biblical scholarship on this question of what to do with texts of terror, trying to show how those conversations and the Christian tradition offer resources for thinking about the question of what to do with the artistic texts of artistic authorities who terrorize, because the question is basically the same there. As you mentioned, there are all kinds of complexities and differences that we of course need to acknowledge. But the basic question is, what should we do with the texts of authorities who terrorize? The nature of that authority is different. They terrorize in different ways. There are all kinds of distinctions. But the basic question is the same. With Confederate monuments, I really try to draw on women’s reflection on symbols of violence.

SHADLE: Mm hmm.

GUTH: Because they have a lot . . . There's a lot of rich reflection in women's theology on the cross as a symbol of violence, and what do we do with this symbol of violence at the center of our tradition? I find those questions in that discussion helpful for thinking about Confederate monuments as violent symbols. And then finally in the third case study, I use women's conversation around whether suffering can ever be redeemed to distill four criteria for evaluating institutions that are trying to make reparations for slavery and sexual violence. So, in each of these three cases, I'm trying to say Christians have kind of already been there and done that, and let's see what kind of wisdom they've generated thinking through these kinds of questions, and how that might apply to the public cases in American political life.

SHADLE: Yeah. And just to tie some threads together. I think you're right that it's womanist perspectives in particular on that question of, not redemptive suffering, but finding redemption in suffering that, you know, there's questioning of that or, like you said, challenging the . . . trying to make that too simple or too neat, that was really helpful.

Okay. So, another of your cases, or something you talked about throughout the book, is Georgetown University's attempt to address its historical connections with slavery. So, historically, I should know this, but isn't it that that the founding of the university was funded through selling slaves that had been owned by the Maryland Jesuits? Isn't that right, or . . . ?

GUTH: Yeah. So, the Maryland Jesuits had a number of plantations and owned a number of enslaved persons. And Father Mulledy,¹¹ who was the President of Georgetown College at the time, sold what have become known as the GU272, so the 272 persons owned by Georgetown, owned by the Maryland Jesuits, to basically keep Georgetown College from going under.

SHADLE: Mm hmm.

GUTH: We now know, actually, that the 272 was actually a little larger number. It was more than 272 people. But the Georgetown case is really interesting, and actually there's a connection to Holy Cross, where I teach, because Father Mulledy went on to become the founding president of Holy Cross.

SHADLE: Oh! Hmm!

GUTH: And so we're historically connected to Georgetown. But yeah, I mean, the Georgetown case study was really interesting. The thing that makes it so interesting for me is that, of course, as a Jesuit institution, that raises the stakes, I think . . .

SHADLE: Yeah.

GUTH: . . . in terms of the legacy being tainted, but also the Jesuits kept meticulous records about these enslaved persons, and so it's actually possible to trace their descendants. And in the book, I talk about this a little bit, but there was a Georgetown alum by the name of Richard Cellini who actually took it upon himself to create what's called the Georgetown Memory Project. He hired a number of genealogists, and they've been going about the business of tracing all of the descendants of these folks, which as you can imagine, has been incredibly valuable to descendants, many of whom for the first time are learning their family lineages and about their ancestors.

SHADLE: Yeah. And so . . . And then a few years ago, the university itself launched a major initiative to, I guess you could say, to provide reparations. And in the book, you talk about how there are some real strengths to those initiatives, but also some weaknesses, and the one that just comes . . . I remember off the top of my head is providing scholarships to those descendants, right?

GUTH: Yeah. I mean, one of the moves that Georgetown made was to offer . . . I forget the language they use, it was basically preferential admissions for any descendants of the GU272. But yeah, then a lot of descendants said, “Well, yeah, that's nice. But like, really what the university should be doing is offering scholarships for those folks, and other financial aid.”

SHADLE: Oh, okay, so I was not quite correct.

GUTH: Yeah, I mean, this is a continually evolving case. What I do in the book is, I try to evaluate it. I distill four criteria from womanist thinking about what needs to be done in order for there to even be a possibility that suffering might be redeemed, and I try to evaluate the Georgetown response according to these four criteria. The first one is truth telling. The second one is honoring victims’ agency. The third one is the possibility of learning. And the fourth is reparations.

SHADLE: Mm hmm.

GUTH: And I found the Georgetown response . . . You know, it was really good on many of the accounts. I found them lacking on the second and fourth. There were a lot of complaints from descendants about not being included as fully as they should have been in the process that Georgetown has taken, and I see that as a kind of violation of . . . I mean, the descendants aren't direct victims, but they are representatives of their ancestors. And so there's some shortcomings there. And I think some shortcomings around reparations, too. But, I’m just really trying to think through the process that they've gone through in terms of those four criteria. And I do the same thing actually for the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary where Yoder taught. They also had a process of lament and reparations for victims.

SHADLE: Mm hmm. But that is an important point. And you know, I was interested in things we can learn from that experience. That does seem to often be the case, that those who are directly affected aren't always included in the process . . .

GUTH: Yes.

SHADLE: . . . of discussing the response to an injustice or to abuse or harm.

GUTH: That was one of the most interesting things to me in studying this, was, you know . . . I heavily depended on Rachel Swarns’s excellent journalism for the New York Times. I mean, she wrote all of the kind of investigative pieces on Georgetown's process, and she interviewed a lot of the descendants that Richard Cellini had found. And it was so interesting to me to hear their responses to the process. Because a lot of times, they're basically saying, ‘Why haven't we been included,” right?

SHADLE: Mm hmm.

GUTH: And there are a number of descendant groups that have organized and have been in dialogue with Georgetown over various aspects of their response. And of course the . . . You know, one of the difficulties, I think, of engaging victims is that they don't all agree.

SHADLE: Right, right, right.

GUTH: It's not as if they're a homogeneous group, and they all think there's one . . . the same right way to respond to these violations. But I do think you're right. It's a real shame that their voices are often not given the consideration that they deserve. But then there are the complexities of how to go about doing it, when they all have a diverse set of views themselves about what's the best way to respond.

SHADLE: But that also connects to what we were talking about before is one of the main points, that beneath the surface of these discussions of the legacy are, you know, issues of power, of voice, of structure.

GUTH: Exactly.

SHADLE: And so, if those power relationships remain intact as you're figuring out how to respond, then the response will likely, and at least in certain ways, even with good intentions, have weaknesses, you know.

GUTH: Yeah, yeah. And that's why actually in the book, I argue that I found . . . I mean, there were problems with AMBS’s institutional response as well, but I actually found that their response better met the criteria that I was using to evaluate them than Georgetown did, in part because they actually invited folks who had been violated by Yoder to act as consultants in the whole process, and so those folks had a voice in the institution’s thinking about how to go about responding in a way that the Georgetown case, you know, it tended to be more often the case that the descendants were complaining about not being included. So, I found AMBS a little stronger on that point, and also AMBS offered financial reparations, in the sense that they paid for therapy for victims of Yoder. So, there were a couple of points at which I felt they had a better response just based on the criteria I distilled from my womanist guides. But there were advantages and disadvantages throughout those institutional responses.

SHADLE: Well . . . And that connects to another point in the book that I think is worth bringing up. As you say, one of the drawbacks of at least some of the responses, you know ,in the typology is to treat victims solely as victims.

GUTH: Yeah.

SHADLE: Right? And so, like, what you're saying is that then if they’re given agency, that's a different kind of response, right?

GUTH: Exactly. I mean . . . So, this was another common thread throughout all the case studies because, you know, in the #MeToo conversations, we were talking about Weinstein’s victims. Who are they? They're actresses. You know, they're legitimate artistic authorities in their own right. And so to act as if they're just his victims, is just not an accurate representation of who these folks are, and this . . . You know, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza,¹² the feminist biblical scholar that I draw on in that chapter, I mean, she makes the same point in terms of biblical studies. And she says, you know, women have always been leaders in the church from its earliest days, and so to pretend like women have just been the victims in sacred texts, or in in the Christian tradition in general, it's just not an accurate representation of who women have been. It denies them their leadership roles and the influence they had.

You know, the same with descendants. I mean they were . . . These folks were real leaders in this process, and so I do think this idea of honoring victims not for their . . . Not thinking about them solely as victims, but honoring them for their own moral agency is really important. That was the second criterion that I distilled from womanist reflection, that comes up a lot in womanist thinking around women who are enslaved and how they, as the saying goes, they made a way out of no way, right? And so, to focus on the agency of these folks and their resiliency and their moral creativity in the face of horrendous injustice is a really important element.

SHADLE: Alright. So, I think we're getting close to the end of our time. And so, just to wrap things up. So, we've been talking about your book, The Ethics of Tainted Legacies, but is there anything else you're working on now or that you're planning on working on in the near future that you want to share?

GUTH: Yeah. Failure!

SHADLE: Oh!

GUTH: I’m working on a book on failure.

SHADLE: Okay, so you're not working on failure.

GUTH: I mean, it might be. Yet to be seen. Maybe the book will never come out. And then I'll have performed the subject. No. I'm wanting to think about . . . In some ways, this book idea is coming out of the tainted legacies project. But I want to think about failure and the value of failure. And so, you know, as an ethicist, of course, that means I have to think about moral failure. And so, I've been working on a couple of pieces trying to think about what the value of moral failure is. I've been working on a piece on Dietrich Bonhoeffer and what he might offer or teach us about moral failure. Because, as you know, he was living during the Nazi period, what he described as a context of total moral failure. So, I wanted to look to his life and legacy to see what resources he offers for thinking about the value of failure. So . . . And then I'll probably move on and talk about other forms of failure. But, you know, the idea is just a baby at this point. So, like, I can't really say much more than that, but that's where I'm headed.

SHADLE: Okay. And, I mean, I'm just speculating, or going off the top of my head. It seems like, you know, when you talk about failure, you could talk about it from an eschatological perspective. You know, so even if you work on something, and it, in certain ways, it ends in failure, you know it never takes off, or, you know, it's destroyed or doesn't last. You know, is there some eschatological value in that work? You know, I don't know, that's just . . .

GUTH: Yeah, no, that sounds good.

SHADLE: That's what came to my mind when you talked about that. But, you know, is anything good ever truly lost? You know, that sort of thing.

GUTH: Yeah. Well, I'm wanting to say there is a value in failure, and so it would be up to me to articulate what it is, you know, and I think that might be one way to do it, yeah.

SHADLE: Yeah, that's true right? There is value in the failure itself, too, right? Okay. Well, thanks. It's been great talking to you. It's been a really good conversation. So thank you for doing this.

GUTH: Thank you for having me. I've enjoyed our conversation.

1. Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918), American theologian and Baptist pastor, author of Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Christianizing the Social Order (1912), and A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917)

2. John Howard Yoder (1927-1997), American Mennonite theologian, author of The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian Pacifism (1971), The Politics of Jesus (1972), and When War is Unjust: Being Honest in Just-War Thinking (1984), among other publications.

3. Rachel Waltner Goossen, “‘Defanging the Beast’: Mennonite Responses to John Howard Yoder’s Sexual Abuse,” in Mennonite Quarterly Review 89 (2015): 7-80. Available online at: https://www.bishop-accountability.org/news5/2015_01_Goossen_Defanging_the_Beast.pdf

4. Jean Vanier (1928-2019), in 1964 founded the L’Arche communities, communities of people with developmental disabilities and others who care for them. In 2020, after Vanier’s death, the L’Arche organization released a report detailing Vanier’s sexual abuse of six women to whom he was providing spiritual guidance.

5. Fr. Marko Rupnik, S.J. (1954- ), Slovenian former Jesuit priest and artist, credibly accused of sexually abusing nuns under his spiritual care in Slovenia.

6. Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), American pastor and theologian, author of Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) and The Nature and Destiny of Man (1943), among many other works.

7. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), German pastor and theologian, author of The Cost of Discipleship (1937) and Letters and Papers from Prison (1951), executed by the Nazis in 1945 for his role in a plot to assassinate Hitler.

8. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), German philosopher, best known for his Being and Time (1927).

9. Fr. Marcial Maciel (1920-2008), Mexican priest and founder of the Legionaries of Christ, he has been credibly accused of sexually abusing several young boys and seminarians in educational institutions run by the Legionaries, and also to have had sexual relationships with at least four women, leading to fathering at least six children.

10. Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984).

11. Fr. Thomas F. Mulledy, S.J. (1794-1860), American-born Jesuit priest, president of Georgetown College in Washington, D.C., and founder of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

12. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (1938- ), Romanian-born American feminist biblical scholar, best known for In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (1983).