For Our Daughters tells the stories of clergy sexual abuse survivors in their own words
This article originally appeared at Baptist News Global on September 26, 2024.
“Nothing draws fire like drawing attention to sexual abuse and coverups in white evangelical churches. Nothing even comes close.”
These are the words Kristin Du Mez chose to reflect on as she prepared herself on the eve of the release of her film For Our Daughters. “Those of us who do this work know what’s coming.”
Nineteen months earlier, she posted online: “I’ve noted this pattern for two-plus years now. What sickens me is that I know this is only a mild version of what survivors face in these spaces. And they don’t have platforms and often don’t have people who have their backs.”
That’s what For our Daughters provides. It’s an opportunity for women who have been abused by powerful men within the most influential movements of modern evangelicalism to warn the rest of the women in the country about what’s ahead for them if these men expand their power beyond the walls of their homes and churches to the government this November.
Soon after Du Mez’s bestselling book, Jesus and John Wayne, released in the summer of 2020, Du Mez began hearing from conservative evangelical women who told her: “Kristin, it’s too late for us. We’ve made our choices and we’re living our lives that we made. But we want something different for our daughters.”
As Du Mez reflected on the platform her book has given her over the past four years, she wanted to center the perspectives of women on the underside of conservative evangelicalism’s gender hierarchies. As she said recently, “This film is for their daughters and for all our daughters.”
The question those of us who watch the documentary now will have to ask ourselves is: Will we have their backs, or will we continue to perpetuate the system of sacralized male power that abused them?