NDAs: an utterly familiar poison for Mennonites

MAST is delighted to present the second of two guest posts from Stephanie Krehbiel, Executive Director of Into Account, an advocacy organization that supports survivors & allies seeking justice, accountability, & recovery in Christian (and quite often Mennonite) contexts. Learn more about Stephanie’s perspective on advocacy and accountability in this interview. Check out the many valuable resources on their blog. The good people at Into Account offer free support to survivors, and they can always use financial support for their important work.

These posts focus on nondisclosure agreements or NDAs. In an internal statement to MCC staff (obtained by MAST), MCC Executive Directors stated that they estimated that NDAs had been used “less than half a dozen times in the past 12 years.” MAST is aware of 12 cases so far where NDAs have been offered. In three cases, the individual or couple refused to sign. In the other cases we know about, an NDA was signed. We don’t know the exact year for all of these cases.

(These two posts have been lightly edited from their original form as Facebook posts, posted on June 26, July 3 and July 11, 2024.)

I’d like to talk some more about the misuse of NDAs in Christian organizations. I’m going to tailor this to Mennonites, because of the role that NDAs play in the workplace abuse crisis at Mennonite Central Committee. But NDAs are common across the Christian institutional world, and I think this analysis is broadly applicable.

The short version: NDAs sustain and reproduce the most spiritually violent tendencies in organizational cultures. Abuse of all kinds–sexual, psychological, financial, spiritual, physical, emotional–thrives in cultures of silence. The normalization of NDAs makes that silence feel both necessary and legally enforceable.

When NDAs are a routine feature of terminations and settlements, there is no chance to learn from what went wrong. There’s no chance for systemic intervention, because the NDAs make victims believe they’re alone. Abusive employees who sign NDAs move to other institutions and continue to abuse. Victims who sign NDAs are pushed to “move on” and “heal” without being able to share their experiences with potential support people.

NDAs are fundamentally dishonest and at times their terms necessitate outright lying. They prevent victims from finding each other. They prevent healing. They prevent learning from mistakes. There is no way to pray away the violence that they do to the spiritual health of a community.

OK, let’s dive in deeper.

When I think about the historical path that led us to this point, I think about how many Mennonites I know who hold onto the secrets of incest within their own families to the point of risking the safety of their children. The churches that push out victims for naming their abusers. The suicides that are barely spoken of despite the traumatic imprint they leave on multiple generations. The miserable heterosexual marriages of queer people forced to live in the closet. The men whose violent anger is excused because, in whispered tones, we’re told their fathers were even worse. One of my friends was raped in college by a guy from their Mennonite church; when they reported him to the police and named him publicly, their pastor admonished them and pointed out a woman in the congregation whose husband was an abuser. “Her husband beats her, but she doesn’t have to go around talking about it all the time,” he told my friend. “If she can stay quiet, so can you.”

I once read an NDA that a Mennonite college attempted to make one of my clients sign to shut her up about the financial, emotional, and sexual abuse she’d suffered at the hands of some absolute sadists in their athletic department. The confidentiality agreement they tried to push on her extended not only to her, but to the other members of her family, including her sister, who was a victim of the same abusers. Her Mennonite college tried to coerce her into signing away the rights of her entire family to speak about the abuse she survived in exchange for a payoff. She refused to sign, and continued to shoulder the burden of student debt and the cost of living with PTSD.

The power imbalance was both obscene and utterly normalized within Mennonite culture, up to and including the persecution narrative that cast the institution as a beleaguered victim of a survivor being difficult and demanding. Mennonites have been using narratives like this to throw people away for centuries; the practice of shunning primed us for this way of thinking. To quote the Canadian Mennonite article about MCC:

“The couple recalled an instance when MCC colleagues in Africa simply vanished from the MCC scene. They said no one, including themselves, said anything. That’s the culture, Clarke said: ‘We don't ask. We don't talk about it.’ They recall thinking that the people who were gone ‘must have done something terrible.'

"There seems to be something deeply Mennonite about not questioning authority.’ Clarke said.”

And if I can take a few steps back for a second for a wider view: NDAs are ubiquitous in the conservative white evangelical world because the prevailing theology in that world is explicitly, unapologetically authoritarian. Submit without question. If leaders want things hidden, it’s for the good of everybody.

Pay attention: **This** is how MCC leadership is talking right now. Trust. Submit.

And of course for us common folk, secrecy is holy, and silence is righteous. Authoritarian theology grooms its followers for authoritarian government. It’s not for nothing that NDAs are still most strongly associated with Tr*mp.

If NDAs feel like a continuation of the same cultures of silence that have plagued Mennonite families, churches, and institutions, it’s because they are. They’re a poison of our wider culture, but to quote a wise witch in a Terry Pratchett book, “Poison goes where poison’s welcome.” Mennonites have welcomed this poison because it feels utterly familiar.

There’s not some evil secular world out there from which Christian institutions are a morally superior refuge. There are just people, and institutions, and people inside institutions either defying or conforming to norms, for good and for ill. And when the poison is deep, it takes a lot more than prayers and trust in leadership to draw it out. Mennonite institutions have never been an exception to any of this.

So. If you want better norms, push your institutions. Ask your questions, and when they won’t answer, ask why.