272: Sarah Stankorb | Author of Disobedient Women
Preacher Boys Podcast
Eric Skwarczynski
4.5 • 737 Ratings
🗓️ 17 December 2023
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Journalist Sarah Stankorb outlines how access to the internet—its networks, freedom of expression, and resources for deeply researching and reporting on powerful church figures—allowed women to begin dismantling the false authority of evangelical communities that had long demanded their submission.
A generation of American Christian girls was taught submitting to men is God’s will. They were taught not to question the men in their families or their pastors. They were told to remain sexually pure and trained to feel shame if a man was tempted. Some of these girls were abused and assaulted. Some made to shrink down so small they became a shadow of themselves. To question their leaders was to question God.
All the while, their male leaders built fiefdoms from megachurches and sprawling ministries. They influenced politics and policy. To protect their church’s influence, these men covered up and hid abuse. American Christian patriarchy, as it rose in political power and cultural sway over the past four decades, hurt many faithful believers. Millions of Americans abandoned churches they once loved.
Yet among those who stayed (and a few who still loved the church they fled), a brave group of women spoke up. They built online megaphones, using the democratizing power of technology to create long-overdue change.
In Disobedient Women, journalist Sarah Stankorb gives long-overdue recognition for these everyday women as leaders and as voices for a different sort of faith. Their work has driven journalists to help bring abuse stories to national attention. Stankorb weaves together the efforts of these courageous voices to present a full, layered portrait of the treatment of women and the fight for change within the modern American church.
Disobedient Women is not just a look at the women who have used the internet to bring down the religious power structures that were meant to keep them quiet, but also a picture of the large-scale changes that are happening within evangelical culture regarding women’s roles, ultimately underscoring the ways technology has created a place for women to challenge traditional institutions from within.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Trigger warning. This podcast contains descriptions of various abusive situations. Listener discretion is advised. |
| 0:09.2 | You are listening to the Preacher Boys podcast, a podcast shedding light on decades of mental, physical, and sexual abuse within the independent fundamental Baptist movement. |
| 0:20.4 | The testimony shared on this podcast are told from the personal experience and perspective of the survivors. |
| 0:26.8 | Not all legal outcomes are known or final. |
| 0:29.8 | Any suspect is presumed innocent until proven guilty in the court of law. |
| 0:34.4 | Now, here is your host, Eric Squarsinski. Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Preacher Boys |
| 0:41.4 | podcast. Sarah, thank you so much for joining me on today's episode. Thank you. So, so good to be here. |
| 0:48.6 | Yeah, I'm glad to have you on. I was a little late to the show, catching your. It was on my list and, and then it feels like |
| 0:57.7 | it just came out and everybody started blowing up Twitter and Facebook and everywhere saying, |
| 1:03.4 | have you read this? And I was like, it's sitting here. I know I need to read this. I could do this. |
| 1:08.3 | And I mean, needless to say, it was well worth checking out. |
| 1:13.5 | And I really appreciated both from reading your book and then when we did a panel together |
| 1:19.3 | for Courage 365, which I'll link to in the show notes for people to check out, I was |
| 1:25.1 | taken aback by you as a person and the way that you approach these stories because |
| 1:31.3 | there's a lot of exploitative journalists that I've encountered over the last three years. |
| 1:36.3 | There's a lot of people who I think write these stories without caring about the women or |
| 1:41.3 | even male victims that are being covered in these stories. So I want to first and foremost say thank you for your approach in capturing these stories. |
| 1:50.4 | Thank you. I feel we are saying thank you for treating people with humanity. |
| 1:58.5 | I will say some of my sources who I've covered for years have had these one-off quick and rough encounters with journalists. |
| 2:13.6 | And that's not the way it should be. |
| 2:16.0 | Yeah, yeah. |
| 2:16.6 | You can almost be re-traumatizing when I have conversations where it's, and it is, it's a very transactional, |
... |
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