I have been recently reading a book by an American author called Wade Mullen.  His book, Something’s Not Right is full of provocative insights about the dynamics of churches, especially those which incubate abusive practices.  Early on in the book, he introduces an important theme about the way that secrecy finds a place in many congregations and can be a source of toxic harm. Mullen identifies five types of secrecy.  For this post I find it easier, even at the risk of leaving something out, to present a shorter list of three.  My attempt to categorise the way secrecy operates in churches thus departs from Mullen’s more detailed classification.  The shorter incomplete list also makes a concession to a memory that finds a description with only three headings far easier to manage than one with five.  The important thing is that we recognise that secrecy, as experienced in churches, comes in more than one guise.  These headings need to be separated from one another for the sake of clarity and understanding. In this way we can appreciate what might be going on when secrecy in its different manifestations is operating in the life of a church congregation.

Overall, a secret is probably best defined as a piece of information that is kept hidden for one of a number of reasons.  Many of us grew up in families where there were family secrets which had never been discussed for decades, even lifetimes.  There was perhaps the cousin who had spent time in prison or the aunt who had a child out of wedlock. Today there are still families where illegitimacy is never discussed and adopted children are never told about their past.  Nevertheless, generally the tendency is now to hold on to fewer family secrets than in the past.  The notion of stigma of course still exists, but now there are probably fewer reasons to feel it today in the way our Victorian ancestors experienced it.  Today we regard many of the secrets of the past as revealing tragedy rather than wickedness.  Contemporary social attitudes have helped us all to let go of many of the old reasons for hanging on to family secrets.

As I thought through the nature of secrets that can exist in our church communities, I realised that many continue to do harm.  I want first to speak of deep secrets which Mullen calls dark.  The experience by an individual of past sexual abuse within a church context could be described in this way.  A fiendishly evil act is perpetrated against a child. The damage done to the young person is made far worse by a promise imposed on the child by the perpetrator.  What has happened must never be revealed. The child grows up with the deep secret which is like a place of darkness inside the soul.  It cannot be visited or brought to the light. There must be many people in our churches carrying such deep secrets about which the rest of the world knows nothing. Many such secret-burdened victims attend church.  Even if they succeed in burying their secrets, these hidden events can be said to live within the individual concerned, accomplishing their dark work of harm to the psyche. The external manifestations of a buried secret may be mental or physical.  Mental afflictions like PTSD, depression or a dissociative disorder can be the public manifestations of a buried secret. The same secret also lives on inside one other personality, that of the perpetrator.  It is hard to see how the action of abusing an innocent child can ever be forgotten or brushed out of existence in some way, merely because it is not spoken about. Even if the secrets of a perpetrator or victim are never spoken of, their capacity to affect the life of a congregation is significant. Spiritual and psychological woundedness in a person cannot always be prevented from spreading itself around to affect others in unpredictable ways. Some secret carriers may, of course, learn through skilled help to overcome the traumas of the past, but many do not.  

Deep secrets are not the only kind that afflict and sometimes poison our church communities.  Guided in part by Mullen’s analysis, I want to address two further ways that secrecy enters the church bloodstream in negative ways.   The first of these two types is what I want to call control by secrecy.  A powerful group in a church community holds on to its power by excluding all but a favoured few from having access to important information. This form of holding power, by restricting access to information, is summed up in the aphorism ‘knowledge is power’.  A vivid example of the way this type of secrecy operates is in the summary report of the Bishop’s commissioners to the parish of Wymondham.  The way that information about PCC decisions and details of the finances were restricted to a few favoured people was a factor in the general sense of dysfunction that was creating much unhappiness in the congregation.  Obviously, there are some things that have to be kept confidential in any organisation. But it is not uncommon for the people in charge to control information as a way of consolidating power and influence for themselves.  Any democratic organisation will want to share details of decision making, allowing the people they represent to know how things are being done on their behalf.   Without proper information all those outside the charmed group of leaders, the in-crowd, are left without any knowledge of what is being decided on their behalf. 

A third use of secrecy is also about control but in this form, it is about control of an individual. One person threatens to reveal the private information of another unless they cooperate to do the blackmailer’s bidding.  We normally associate blackmail with money, but there are many ways in which the power of threatening to reveal secrets is used to obtain other ends. With children it may be used just to feel the momentary thrill of being powerful over someone else.  In writing these words, I can remember an incident at my boarding school when I was 11 or 12. The school bully was threatening to tell a secret about me to everyone. My ‘shameful’ secret centred around my journey home from the school on several occasions by bicycle on a Sunday afternoon during the summer term. It was a thirteen-mile journey, but my brother and I managed it fairly easily.  For the journey back to school the bicycles would be loaded up on to the family car roof rack.  The bully had got the impression that we had claimed to have cycled the journey in both directions.  He then reported to me the information that my father had been seen lifting the bicycles off the rack. I think I succeeded in persuading him that there was never any claim on my part to cycle 26 miles in a single afternoon.  I thus managed to convince him that there was no secret plot to persuade the world that I was a stamina cyclist. 

The possession of secret information about another person can lead to an exploitative relationship over them for a long time. The one who possesses the secret can, if they wish, manipulate the other person by making implicit or explicit threats.   Unless you do what I ask, I will release your secret.  We saw the way that Bishop Peter Ball was able to manipulate and blackmail his victims once he had made them feel guilty over aspects of their sexuality.   The sheer force of Ball’s personality had already extracted from them their intimate personal secrets. We can imagine many similar scenarios in a church abuse situation where the knowledge of personal sexual secrets is then twisted to make someone vulnerable to further abuse.  Other church situations can be imagined where individuals reveal to a pastor their deep personal secrets, only to find themselves emotionally in bondage to the same spiritual leader.  The revelation of personal information to another always has the potential to be exploited by that person.  Churches contain their share of manipulators and blackmailers as anywhere else.

Secrecy is deeply embedded in the dynamics of power abuse, both on the personal and the institutional level.  The church should, of course, be a place where we can share our deepest truths and vulnerabilities without any fear of betrayal.  No one should ever have to find their entrusted secrets being revealed to others.  The cults have always used this dynamic of persuading an individual to hand over everything, their money and their intimate secrets to ensure that the individual concerned can never leave.  The threat of revealing shame laden events in one’s life is one way that such cultic groups can exert so much power over their followers.  All too often we can see the way that the process of uncovering a person’s private vulnerabilities is the prelude to a life of exploitation and an experience of brokenness.

Secrets are, in the last resort, precious and fragile things. The exposing of our own secrets to another and the receiving those of others can be a quasi-sacred process.  If sharing of secrets can be a precious, even a holy thing, the Church should try to become a place where we can do this really well. The successful sharing of secrets with another person is a place on the way to building complete trust in that person.  Trust of this kind is part of the range of components that together create love and community, both of which are among the values that Christians look for. When trust disappears and a betrayal of our vulnerabilities takes place, we find fragmentation and isolation.  May the Church find itself better able to be a place committed to the preservation of justice, truth and integrity.