When did we know that the #MeToo moment was truly over?
At its most compelling, #MeToo tried to change a culture that both concealed and enabled the illegal abuse of women and imposed hypocritical double standards, holding women to one standard of behavior while celebrating and elevating unscrupulous men.
But events in 2024 have told us loudly and clearly that the moment has passed.
Perhaps it was when reports emerged that Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s choice to be the next secretary of defense, had paid an accuser to settle a sexual assault claim. He denies wrongdoing, but his defense — that he had consensual sex with a married woman — was still dreadful. His philandering and mistreatment of women have been so egregious that his mother called him an “abuser of women” in an email to him (she has since disavowed her statement) — and yet somehow his chances of being confirmed by the Senate appear to be increasing.
Perhaps it was when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who is married to actress Cheryl Hines, allegedly had an improper “personal relationship” via smartphone with Olivia Nuzzi, a political reporter who is much younger, and she lost her job while he was picked to run the Department of Health and Human Services.
But I think it happened earlier, when a jury found Trump responsible for sexual abuse, and he was ultimately reelected to the presidency. After years of rightfully arguing that combating sexual assault and sexual abuse can’t override due process, many conservatives not only disregarded the jury verdict, they actually reveled in how little his voters cared about the scandal or just dismissed it as another instance of “lawfare” against Trump.
I distinctly remember the mood on the right when the #MeToo movement got going. There was a sense of schadenfreude. The morally bankrupt, sexualized culture of Hollywood and the liberal media had finally been exposed. For all their talk about feminism and respecting women, many famous liberals proved to be dangerous hypocrites — or much, much worse.
Yes, there was leakage into right-wing media. Roger Ailes was pushed out at Fox News in 2016, and Bill O’Reilly suffered the same fate after my New York Times colleagues Emily Steel and Michael Schmidt reported that O’Reilly or Fox had paid $13 million to settle claims of sexual misconduct made by five women against him.
All that happened before my colleagues Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey published their Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on Harvey Weinstein. But the early wave of #MeToo revelations was heavily concentrated in traditionally liberal institutions.
When #MeToo became #ChurchToo, though, that was the beginning of the end. In a remarkably short period, the narrative changed. No longer was sexual abuse and exploitation a “Hollywood problem” or a “secular problem,” it was also an evangelical problem, and it was a problem in many of the most important institutions of the church.
The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, faced a sexual abuse “apocalypse,” a series of scandals that my friend Russell Moore, the former head of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, called “a reality far more evil and systemic than I imagined it could be.”
Before I joined the Times, I reported on the fall of Ravi Zacharias, perhaps the evangelical world’s most respected Christian apologist. After he died, reports emerged that he’d not only abused women, but that his organization had helped conceal and enabled his abuse as well.
My wife, Nancy, reported on decades of abuse at a Christian summer camp network headquartered in Missouri called Kanakuk Kamps, which is one of the largest Christian camp networks in America. In the worst scandal at the camp, a predator named Pete Newman operated on the grounds for years before he was finally caught and sentenced to life in prison. The prosecutor in his criminal case estimated that his victims could number in the hundreds.
Depositions and internal documents demonstrate that the camp retained and promoted Newman even after it received reports of nude activities — including nude basketball and nude four-wheeling — with young boys. And then, after Newman’s abuse was finally reported to authorities, the camp covered up its complicity by blanketing victims with various forms of nondisclosure agreements.
The people who promoted Newman, ignored his misconduct and silenced victims still run the camp.
I could go on and on with additional examples, but soon enough Christians realized that what they thought was a “them” problem was also an “us” problem. The moral high ground slid away. #ChurchToo exposed the right, and the right wasn’t ready to repent.
I don’t mean that everyone wasn’t ready. There were and are courageous men and women who seek to hold the church accountable. The Southern Baptist Convention, most notably, formed a sexual abuse task force, and its executive committee voted to waive attorney-client privilege to conduct an open and transparent investigation.
But as Bob Smietana reported in Religion News Service in June, the task force did not finish its work. It “was charged two years ago with creating resources to help churches deal with abuse, publishing a database of abusive pastors and finding permanent funding and long-term plans for abuse reforms. While the task force did unveil a new ‘Essentials’ training resource for churches, the other two tasks remain incomplete.”
There’s an easy answer for understanding the end of #MeToo, one that has the benefit of being largely true: American society (including the American church) is still rife with misogyny. As with race, the fact that America has come quite far in respecting the legal rights of women does not mean that we don’t still have far to go to achieve true cultural equality and respect.
But misogyny was never a complete explanation, especially given the fact that sex abuse isn’t confined to men abusing women and girls. Something else is at work, something that also indicates a deep and profound moral flaw. A person might value vulnerable people in the abstract — or might even declare a strong commitment to justice — but very few people will sacrifice anything they truly value to correct an injustice that doesn’t involve them immediately and directly.
My wife’s story helped me understand. When she was 12 years old, a vacation Bible schoolteacher abused her in her own home. Decades later, her pastor, by then retired, told her that the same person had abused at least a dozen other women and girls in the church.
The abuser was never held accountable — either by church leaders or law enforcement. Instead, he moved to a town in Kentucky and became a high school girls’ basketball coach. He lost his teaching certificate in 2023 after there were multiple reports of misconduct.
The abuser’s father was a powerful person in the church and in Nancy’s small town. Confronting his son carried a cost, and the simple fact is that very few people were willing to bear that cost, including people who were very close to Nancy. Not even their love for her could overcome their fear of the social risk.
Yes, people want justice. They want abuse to stop, but they also don’t want to poison their relationships with friends and colleagues or undermine their social status.
They don’t want to say no to kids who ask to go back to their favorite summer camp. They don’t want to lose an election. Any sacrifice, no matter how attenuated, is too much.
And so here we are, with the nation about to be led by a man found liable for sexual abuse, with key members of his chosen senior team beset by their own gross scandals, voted into office on the strength of overwhelming white evangelical support. (According to 2024 exit polls, he won white evangelicals by 65 points and lost everyone else by 18 points.) And all too many Christians still celebrate his victory — and their indispensable support — as a triumph of good over evil.
When I was younger and more naive, I wondered why so many historical injustices persisted for so long in the United States. Now I have my answer.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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